When Healing Becomes Educating, Vol. 1 - Waldorf Research Institute

The Members of Being in Man and Nature*
WILHELM PELIKAN
The Fourfold Kingdoms of Nature/Man and Plant
Surrounded by three kingdoms of nature, man himself represents a
fourth kind of being on earth. Very close connections exist between him and
the other three kingdoms of nature. The kingdom of unenlivened being,
most perfectly expressed in the minerals, is as much part of man’s being as
is the world of formative forces of life—which finds its purest expression in
the plant. The possession of soul man shares with the animal. He is man in
the full sense of the word because he is able to comprehend himself as spirit.
The world is in the mineral; it lives in the plant; it experiences in the animal;
in man it comprehends itself, and in this sense man is the “core of nature.”
The science of chemistry uses analysis to break down substances into
their elements, showing that water, for example, seemingly a uniform
substance, may be separated into two primary components, hydrogen and
oxygen. In the same way, a sublime “universal alchemy” reveals to us that
plant and animal, and also man, are composite beings; in a process of
“universal analysis” it lays bare before us the various “ingredients” of plants,
animals and man, aspects which in the previous chapters 1 have only been
established by a process of thought: the different members of being.
One process of “universal alchemy” in which the members of being are
revealed to us is the process of dying. Plant, animal and man are subject to
it. First of all, this process leaves behind the corpses of these three beings. But
the corpses produced by death immediately begin to change—all three of
them—and this change has a definite final goal. They gradually become part
of the fourth, unenlivened, mineral kingdom. The corpse may be perceived
by the senses. The second result of the process of separation, life, escapes;
that is, it withdraws from the sphere of sensory perception—where it could
be seen, if not directly, at least in its effects—and returns to the supersensible
sphere.
*Translation by R.E.K. Meuss, reprinted by kind permission from the October 1970, British
Homeopathic Journal.
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