Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/495/en

The sense-active head-nature of the bird overwhelms, as it were, its metabolic-limb function. The bird swallows its food almost as quickly as it digests it, and excretes it in largely mineralised form. Its physiological metabolic functions recede strongly and shift into the movement sequences governed by the nerve-sense system. The complement to this one-sidedness is supersensible in nature and lives, soul-effectively, as an elemental being of the air — called from time immemorial a sylph. Its being is bound to the world of birds. Such an elemental being follows the bird in flight within the vortices of air it leaves in its wake. In this community, every bird's flight is a source of ensoulment of the airy periphery. One need only follow for a stretch the generous, elegant sweep-figures of swifts or house martins shooting past. As the earthworm sculpts the solid earth, and the fish sculpts the water, so birds, with the forces of their soul-being, sculpt the element of air.