Dornach,
December 15, 1923.
Good
morning, Gentlemen!
Today I shall continue the subject dealt with last time in
answer to Herr Dollinger's question. Should anything else arise,
we can consider this also.
In my answer to Herr Dollinger's question, I spoke of the ants
and how these creatures, bees, wasps and ants are related to one
another, though their modes of life are totally different.
Taking our starting point from this fact, we can really learn a
very great deal about the whole household of Nature, for the
more one learns to understand these small creatures and their
ways, the more one realises how wisely regulated their work is,
and all they are able to accomplish in the realm of Nature.
Last time I told you how the ants make their nests, how they
either build up mounds of the soil itself, or gather together
minute particles of decaying wood, or of wood which has become
quite hard, and is no longer living; also from various other
substances which they mix together. Within these ant-hills are
innumerable passages, along which the ants move in procession,
whole hosts of them. One sees them coming out at the entrances,
searching their surroundings, and collecting what they need.
Sometimes however, it happens that these creatures do not first
build up a mound, but make use of something suitable they find
there already. Perhaps, for instance, a tree has been cut down
and the stump has been left standing; an ant colony comes along
and makes a little chamber inside it, hollows it out, and makes
all kind of passages with their exits. Then perhaps, they heap
up a little earth, make one passage, then another, then a third
and so on, and within these passages are all inter-connected.
You see, to say of all this that it is due to the instinct of
the creatures may be all very well, but nothing very much has
then been said, for when the creature cannot make use of a tree
stump, it builds up a sand heap; when it finds a suitable tree
stump, then it so arranges the matter so that it saves the
labour that would be needed to heap up a hillock. The small
creature adjusts itself to the individual situation, and it
becomes very difficult to state that this is due to instinct.
This would only enable the creature to do everything in
accordance with instinct; but it actually adjusts itself to the
external circumstances. That is the important point.
Here in our country it does not frequently happen, but the
further one goes south the greater nuisance do the ants become.
Imagine a house, and in one corner of it, without the owner
having noticed anything, the ants have gathered; they have
carried in all sorts of things, particles of earth, minute
fragments of wood, and in some corner that has been overlooked
in cleaning, have made a small dwelling place which no one
notices. From here they make passages into the kitchen, into the
pantry, following the most complicated ways, and bring back all
they require for food or other purposes, from the kitchen or
pantry. This can happen in southern countries, and the house may
be quite pervaded by a colony of ants without anyone living
there knowing they are mere fellow inhabitants of the ants,
until they discover by chance, or by sight, that something in
the store cupboard has been nibbled, and the real source only
comes to light when the passages are traced. Here again, one
cannot get very far by speaking of mere instinct, for you would
then have to say that Nature has given these creatures an
instinct to take up their abode precisely in this very house;
what they build there must be so constructed that it is adapted
to this particular house.
But you see, these creatures do not work out of mere instinct;
there is wisdom in what they do. If you test some individual
ant, you would certainly not arrive at the conclusion that it
was especially wise, for what it does when separated from the
colony, or what it may be forced to do, does not reveal any
special wisdom. One then begins to realise that it is not the
individual ant that can reason, but the entire colony of ants as
a unity; the colony of bees, for example, is wise in this sense.
The separate ants of the colony have no individual intelligence,
and for this reason the work is carried on by the whole colony
in an extremely interesting way. There are, moreover, many other
more interesting happenings within these ant-hills. There is,
for instance, a kind of ant which does as follows: somewhere or
other it builds on the ground a kind of wall (drawing on the
board); here it is raised; here, it forms a circle on the
surrounding earth, there, digs a hole. Within are the ants.
Sometimes the hole is at the top, like the crater of a volcano;
within are the many passages with their outlets.
Now these ants do something very peculiar. They destroy all the
grasses and plants which grow round about, with the exception of
one particular kind of grass. All other grasses are destroyed,
even at times, all other plants. Thus, in the centre we have a
kind of hillock, and all round it looks as though the ground had
been very finely paved. Through the ants biting away everything,
the soil has become very compact, and is very firm. There is the
ant-hill, and all round it a smooth pavement, almost like
asphalt, but rather lighter in colour.
The ants then search all round about and collect a certain kind
of grass which they then begin to cultivate. As soon as the wind
brings other seeds, they bite off the new plants the moment they
begin to grow; they will not have them in the place they have
made so smooth, and in all the surrounding area nothing else is
permitted to grow but just this one special kind of grass. The
ants have established a little property of their own, as it
were, and regularly cultivate the kind of grass that best suits
them; nothing else is allowed to grow there; all other plants
are bitten away. The grass which is allowed to grow becomes
quite different in character from the same grass where it grows
further away, where, for instance, it is growing in loose soil.
In the hardened soil made by the ants, the cultivated grass has
quite hard seeds, as hard as stone. One can find these
ant-hills. Round about them there is a regular little farm, and
the ants are engaged in agriculture. Darwin, who especially
observed these things, calls it so. One finds in the soil very
hard seeds somewhat like small grains of maize, and when all is
ready, the ants come out, bite off the tops, and carry them into
their dwelling. For a while they stay inside; one does not see
them, but they are very busy inside there. Whatever they have no
use for, like the little stalks that were still attached to the
hard seeds, they bite off, and after a time they come out again
and run all about, and throw away all they do not want, keeping
in their ant-hill only the hard silica-like seeds. These they
partly use as food, biting them with their very hard teeth, or
they use them for their building. Everything they cannot make
use of they throw out. After all, we men do very much the same.
These farming ants manage to provide themselves with all they
need in a very fine way!
One has really to ask oneself: what is actually happening here?
Actually, an entirely new kind of grass is brought into
existence. These silica-hard seeds cannot be found anywhere
else. They are only produced by the ants, and the ants work
further upon them. What then is really happening here?
Before considering this, we will approach the question from
another side. Let us go back to the wasps, among which I told
you that we find creatures that deposit their eggs on the
leaves, and in the bark of trees; gall-nuts are then formed out
of which the young wasps emerge. But quite other things can also
happen. There are certain caterpillars which look like this
(drawing on the blackboard). You all know them; these
caterpillars are covered with woolly hairs, with quite
prickly-woolly hairs. The following can happen to these
caterpillars. One or more wasps of a special kind simply insert
their eggs into the caterpillar, and when the eggs mature the
grubs creep out of them. Bees, and other insects of this kind,
all make their first appearance as grubs, also the ants. You
know how, when one clears away an ant-heap, one finds the white,
so-called ants' eggs, which are given to caged birds. They are
however, not eggs, but the larvae that have crept out of the
eggs. It is not correct to call them eggs.
Now when the wasp lays its eggs into the caterpillar, it is
really very remarkable. As I have already told you, these grubs
when they first emerge are very hungry, and there are a great
number of them in the caterpillar. It is really remarkable, for
if one of these grubs were to begin to eat the caterpillar's
stomach, the whole affair of the wasp's development would come
to an end, for the caterpillar could not live if any organ, an
eye, or to do with the heart or with the digestion, were eaten
into. The thing would then come to an end. But these minute wasp
grubs show their intelligence by not biting into, or feeding
upon any vital organ, but by eating only those organs which can
be injured for quite a long time. The caterpillar does not die,
it is ill; but the wasp grubs can still go on devouring it. It
is most wisely arranged that the wasp grubs do not bite into
anything that would fatally injure the caterpillar. Possibly you
may have seen how these larvæ emerge from inside the
caterpillar when they are mature? The caterpillar has been their
foster-mother, nourishing the whole brood with her own body. Now
they creep out, develop further, and seek their food from the
plants. When they are fully developed, the eggs are once more
deposited in a similar caterpillar,
You might well say that there is something extremely clever in
all this, and indeed, as I have already said, the more one
observes such things, the more do they arouse one's deepest
admiration. It cannot be otherwise; wonder is kindled, and one
asks oneself the meaning of such things.
If one would discover their meaning, one must first say; we have
the plants growing out of the earth; we have the caterpillars.
Then these insects appear, and eat their fill from the flowers,
and caterpillars, and then reproduce themselves. So it goes on,
over and over again. To us it seems as though the whole insect
world might just as well not exist at all. Naturally, as human
beings, when we see the bee, we say; the bees give us honey,
therefore bee-keeping is of use to us. Very good; but this is
from the point of view of man. If the bees are robbers, and
merely take away the nectar from the flowers, and we then use
the honey for our food, or as a remedy, then this is all to our
advantage. But from the point of view of the flowers, it looks
like a mere robbery in which we take part. The question
therefore is whether from the point of view of the flowers they
would say: out there are those robbers, the bees, wasps and ants
who rob us of our saps; we should thrive much better if they did
not take away our saps.
You see, gentlemen, this is a point of view that a man usually
takes as regards the flowers. But it is not so; it is absolutely
not so. The matter is entirely different. When one is looking at
some flower, and an insect, let us say a bee, is sucking the
juices of the flower, or from the willow blossom, one must say
to oneself: how would it be for the plant if the bee, or the
wasp or some other insect, did not come to suck out this nectar?
How would it be then?
This is naturally a question far more difficult to answer than
that of a mere robbery, for one must look deeply into the whole
household of Nature. It is not possible to reach the right
conclusion unless one is able to look back into the earlier
stages of the earth's evolution. You see, the earth was not
always the same as it is today. If the earth had always been as
it is today, when we find the dead limestone, the dead quartz or
gneiss, or mica-schist, and so on; when we find growing out of
the present-day seeds, the plants, when we find the animals. If
the earth had always been like this, the whole of what we see
today could not exist, could not be there at all! Those who
begin their science only at the point of what exists today give
themselves up to complete illusion.
He who would seek all the mysteries, all the laws of the earth
in that alone wherein modern science seeks them, is as if a
dweller in Mars should come down to the earth, who had no idea
of living people, who only went to a mortuary and saw there the
dead. The dead could not be there at all if they had not first
been living. The inhabitant of Mars who had never seen living
men, and saw only the dead, would first have to be guided to
living men; then he would be able to say — “Yes, now
I understand why the dead have these forms; before I did not
understand this, because I did not know the living form that
preceded the dead one.” Thus, one must go back to earlier
conditions if one would know the laws of the earth´s
evolution. The earth had long ago a very different form; I have
spoken of it as the Moon-condition, and in my book, “An
Outline of Occult Science,” it is also called the
Moon-condition, because the present Moon is a remnant of this
ancient earth. Other stages of evolution in their turn preceded
this one of the Moon. The earth has transformed itself; it was
originally altogether different.
Now the earth was once at such a stage that plants and insects
such as we have today did not exist at all. There was, let us
say, something that can be compared with the earth of today. Out
of this grew plant-like forms, but plant-like forms that were
continually changing, that continually assumed different forms,
as the clouds do for instance. There were then such clouds in
the environment of the earth, but they were not clouds like the
clouds we see today, which are dead, or at least seem to be
dead; they were living clouds, as living as the flowers of
today. If you can imagine to yourselves that our clouds could
become alive and turn a greenish colour, then you would have a
picture of the plant kingdom of that time.
The scientific gentlemen of today have very strange ideas on
such matters. There was recently a most ludicrous article in the
newspaper. Once more a new scientific discovery had been made,
quite in the modern way. It was really absurd! It was stated
that if prepared in a certain way, milk was a good remedy for
scurvy, a very ugly disease. Well, gentlemen, what does the
scientist of today do? I have already referred to this. He
analyses the milk. Then he finds that milk contains such and
such chemical components. But I have also told you that one can
feed mice with the chemical substances in the milk, but if one
gives them these only, the mice die within a few days. Bunge's
pupils confirmed this, (see previously mentioned article in the
“Schweizerische Bienenzeitung”) and merely
said; “Well, yes, there is a life-substance in the milk,
as also in honey, vitamin.” You remember, as I said
before, one might just as well say “poverty comes from
being poor,” as say what is said here, “there is
vitamin in it.”
Well gentlemen, an important discovery has been made, there are
various substances in milk that have very complicated names and
milk when prepared in a special way is a remedy for scurvy. Then
in a truly learned way investigations were made to see whether
the scurvy could be cured if one gave the scurvy patients only
all the things with the learned names that were contained in the
milk. They were not in the least cured by any of the component
substances. But when all of these were present (in the specially
prepared milk) then the scurvy was cured. No single component by
itself cured, only the whole together. Well says the scientist
to himself: what remains over when one subtracts all the
components? What then remains over? For now he eliminates them
all. He does not admit that these components have an etheric
body, he reckons them all out, and what remains?
The “Vitamin!” The vitamin which must be what
cures scurvy is not to be found among the component parts. Where
then is it? So now they make this fine tale — it must be
in the water of the milk! Therefore, the remedy for scurvy is
the water! This is really absurd, but it is a learned affair
today. For if water is to contain vitamin, then with our
learning we should arrive up there in the clouds. We should have
to look around us and say: “Water is everywhere and
vitamin is in the water.” But then we would be at the
stage at which the earth once was. Only today it is no longer
so. Plant-life was there, a living plant covering, and this
living covering of plants was fertilised from all directions
from the environment. There were then no separate animals, no
wasps for instance, but from the surrounding regions there came
a substance which had an animal-like nature. Our earth was once
in a condition of which one could say that it was surrounded by
clouds that had plant-life within them; from the periphery,
other clouds approached and fertilised them; these clouds had an
animal nature. From cosmic spaces came the animal nature; from
the earth the essence of plant-being rose upwards.
All this has changed. The plants have become our clearly
outlined flowers which grow out of the earth, no longer forming
great clouds. But within the plants there remains a longing to
receive an influence from without. Here we have a rose growing
out of the earth; here a rose petal, here another, then a third
and so on. Now comes a wasp. This wasp immediately bites a piece
out of the rose petal, carries it off to its nest, and uses it
for building, or gives it as food to its young. A piece of the
rose petal is simply bitten out by the wasp, and carried there,
Well, as I said before, our rose bushes are no longer clouds:
they have become sharply defined things. But what once lived
within them, what was once united with all that entered in as
the essence of animal life, this has remained behind within the
rose leaves and blossoms. It is there within them. In every rose
leaf is something which must of necessity be in some way
fertilised from without, from the whole environment.
You see, gentlemen, what the flowers need, what they actually
need, is a substance that also plays an important part in the
human body. When you study the human body the most diverse
substances are found in it. But everywhere within the human body
these substances are transformed into something which, in
certain quantities, is always present within the human body
which has need of it. This substance is formic acid.
If you go to an ant-hillock, and collect some ants and squeeze
them, you get a juice. This juice contains formic acid and a
little alcohol. It is inside the ants. But this juice is also
very finely distributed over your body. Whatever you eat during
your lifetime is always transformed into formic acid, not of
course exclusively, for there are other substances also, but in
small quantities. This formic acid permeates your whole body.
When you are ill, and have not sufficient formic acid within
you, it is a serious matter for your body, for it then has a
tendency, just because you have not enough formic acid within
you, (and here I come once more to Herr Müller's question)
your body has a tendency to become gouty, or rheumatic. It
develops too much uric acid, and too little formic acid. The
ants also have in their bodies this substance that the human
body needs. This formic acid, gentlemen, is indeed something
that is made use of throughout nature. You actually cannot find
any bark of any tree that does not contain some formic acid.
Formic acid is everywhere in the tree, just as it is in the
human body. In every leaf, everywhere there must be formic acid.
But not only formic acid must be there, but also what is closely
akin to it, and later becomes the bee poison. All these insects
contain a certain substance within them which is poisonous. If
one is stung by a bee one gets inflammation; if one is stung by
a wasp it is sometimes even worse. This business of wasp stings
can be pretty bad. Brehm describes how these insects can play
bad tricks on men and animals.
It happened that a young cow-herd had taken a large number of
cows out to graze, and the pasture was full of wasp nests. The
cow-herd's dog ran about; suddenly the cow-herd's dog goes mad,
rushes round like a mad dog, and no one knows what has happened.
As fast as it can the dog rushes to a neighbouring stream,
flings itself into the water, and shakes and shakes itself. The
lad was much disturbed by this, and goes to the rescue of the
dog. He does not jump into the water, but tries to help it from
the bank. Most unluckily he steps on a nest, as the dog had
probably done before, and the wasps sting him too, and he begins
to rush about like a madman, and finally jumps into the water.
And now, because the dog has vanished, and the cow-herd has
vanished, confusion arises in the herd of cows. The cows which
tread on nests also get stung, and behave as though mad.
Finally, most of the herd are in the stream also — as if
they were all mad.
You see, insect stings can do one a very bad turn. All these
creatures have poisons in them; even an ant stings and causes a
little inflammation because it injects some formic acid into the
wound. This formic acid, moreover, is present in all living
things in a right dilution. If there were no ants, bees and
wasps, which are the preparers of these poisons, what would
happen?
Truly, gentleman, the same thing would happen that would also
come to pass in the propagation of the human race if all the men
were beheaded and only women were left on the earth. Humanity
could not then continue to exist, for the male semen would no
longer be there. Well, these creatures all have the semen in
addition, but they none-the-less need what comes from these
poisons for their existence, for these poisons have remained
over from what was once in the whole environment. In the finest
state of dilution, bee poison, wasp poison, ant poison, once
descended upon the plants from cosmic spaces, and the remnants
are still present today. So when you see a bee sitting on some
willow-tree or on some flower, you must not say: the insect only
wants to rob the flower of something; rather must you say: when
the little bee sits there and sucks, the flower is so content
that it lets its sap flow to the spot where the bee sucks. While
the bee is taking something from the flower, bee or wasp poison
flows from the bee to the flower. From the wasp, the wasp poison
flows, and more especially when the ant attacks the tree stump
which no longer has life, formic acid flows in. If the ant
visits a flower, then the sap of the flower unites with the
formic acid. This is necessary.
If these things did not happen, if bees, wasps and ants did not
exist and continually attack the plants and bite into them, then
the necessary formic acid, the necessary poisons, would not flow
into the flowers, and the plants would in time die out.
You see, substances such as are usually called life-substances,
are highly valued by man; yet it is precisely only these
substances that are truly life-substances. If one has deadly
nightshade, within it is a poison, a very powerful one. But what
is the deadly nightshade? It collects spirituality from the
world's environment. Poisons are gatherers of what is spiritual;
for this reason they are healing remedies. Fundamentally
speaking, the flowers sicken through the life-substances, and
the little bees, and wasps and ants, work continually as small
physicians bringing to the flowers the formic acid they need,
and at the same moment healing their sickness. Thus all is once
more healed.
The bees, wasps and ants are not mere robbers, for in the same
moment they bring life to the plants.
It is the same with the caterpillars which would also die out,
and none would remain after a time. You will probably say no
great harm would be done if all the caterpillars were to
disappear; but in their turn the birds feed on them. Throughout
the whole of Nature there are these inner relationships. When we
see, for example, how the ants permeate everything with their
formic acid, we look into the whole household of Nature
and its splendour. Everywhere things happen that are essential
for the maintenance of life, and of the world.
You see, here is a tree, and the tree has bark. The bark decays
when I cut down the tree; then it moulders. People say: “Well,
let it rot away.” Just try to imagine all that moulders
away in the forests, fallen leaves and so on, within the course
of the year! Men are willing to let it all rot away, but Nature
orders it otherwise. Everywhere there are ant-heaps, and from
these ant-heaps formic acid enters into the soil of the forest.
When you have both forest soil and an ant-heap, it is the same
as if you take a glass of water and add a drop of something else
to it; the whole contents are at once affected. If you put in
salt, all the water is at once made salty. If you have an
ant-heap then the formic acid goes in the same moment into the
forest soil, and all the soil which is already decaying is
saturated with this formic acid.
It is not only into the inner parts of the living plants, and
into the still living caterpillars that formic acid penetrates
when the bee sits on the flower, and the flower absorbs what it
receives from the bee. All these things can only be learned by
means of spiritual science; the other kind of science is only
concerned with what the bee takes away from the flowers. But the
bees would never have been able to sit for thousands of years on
the flowers had they not fostered them in the act of biting into
them.
So it is also with the lifeless substances of the woods.
Physical science as it is today concludes that the earth will
one day be quite dead. It would indeed be so, for a state of
things would eventually come about when decay would prevail,
when the earth would be dead. That this will not be so is
because wherever the earth decays it is in the same moment
penetrated by all that is yielded up by the bees, wasps and
ants. The bees, it is true, give it only to the living flowers,
the wasps for the most part also to the living plants. But the
ants give what they hand over in the formic acid directly to
what is mouldering and dead; in a certain degree they rouse it
to life, in this way doing their part that the earth in its
decaying substances shall still retain life. Well may one say
that wonder is awakened at the activity of the spirit in all
things, but when one can approach it more nearly, then one
realises it has immense significance.
Let us look once more at those farming ants which cultivate
their little field and change the character of the plants they
grow there. Truly, gentlemen, a man could not nourish himself
with what grows there, for if a man were to eat those little
rice grains that are as hard as silica, he would first get
strange illnesses because he would have too much formic acid
inside him, and in addition to this so injure his teeth that for
a time the dentists would be kept busy. At last he would die
wretchedly, because of these silica-hard rice-grains which had
been thus developed.
But the ant-heap would say: when we ants go out into nature and
suck that out of the plants which is everywhere there, then we
get far too little formic acid, and can give far too little
formic acid to the earth. Let us therefore, select the plants
which we can cultivate so that they get quite hard, stony hard,
and then we can get plenty of formic acid from this hardness. So
these farming ants do this that they may get the greatest
possible amount of formic acid. It is these ants again that give
back so much formic acid to the earth. That is the connection.
From this you can see that poisons when they cause inflammation,
or the like, are also perpetual remedies for the holding back of
the processes of death. One can say, it is precisely the bee
that is of great importance in this regard, that all may be
preserved within the flowers; there is a great affinity between
the bees and the flowers.
This preservation actually shows that every time the insects are
developing their activities on the earth, the earth is, as it
were, quickened by their poison. This is the spiritual
relationship. If someone asks what are the spiritual
relationships, I never like merely to say they are so and so; I
give the facts, and from the facts you can judge for yourselves
whether they have significance or no. The facts are such that
one sees significance everywhere. But the people who call
themselves scientists today, do not say so. In life this has
certain effects. In our country this is perhaps less taken into
account, but when you go further south, the simple folk, the
peasants, will often say out of a kind of instinctive knowledge:
one must not destroy these ant-heaps, for they prevent the mould
from becoming harmful. Those who are still wiser will say
something quite different if you walk with them through the
forest, and especially where trees have been cut down and young
trees are growing up. Then these people who are wise in their
noses, not in their top-story (one can be wise also in one's
nose) when these people go where the trees have been felled and
young trees are being cared for, they will say: “Here, it
will all go well; it does not smell so mouldy as it often does;
there must be an ant-heap near and it is proving its
usefulness.” These people smell this; they are clever with
their noses. Much homely and useful knowledge is derived from a
clever nose! Unfortunately, modern civilisation only regards the
cultivation of the brain and rejects all that is instinctive;
instinct has become merely a word.
Creatures like the bees know all this collectively, as a colony,
as an ant-heap; it comes about by a kind of sense of smell. As I
said before, much that is instinctive knowledge may come from
cleverness of the nose.
Well, gentlemen, we shall continue the subject next week Today,
I wished to say that the bees, wasps and ants do not only rob
Nature, but help to make it possible for Nature to live and
thrive.
Continued in the next issue of SCR.
Thanks
to the Rudolf Steiner Archive
Lecture 9
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