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Apart from the fact already indicated, that for the formation of such entities the co-operation also of life-ether is necessary, we can judge the activity of sound-ether correctly only if we conceive it as a much more inward activity, compared with the formation in external space of Chladni's figures.
This comparison of the activity of the sound-ether, as the form-creating element in nature, with Chladni's phenomenon is drawn correctly only if we recognize that the conception of form, as an expression of that which is called forth through the etheric forces in nature, comprises more than the external spatially bounded shape of an organic or inorganic entity.
This effect of the activity of sound-ether has given it its other name: chemical ether. We have mentioned once before that our conception of 'form' in organically active nature must not be limited merely to that of a body's spatial outline.
By reading in this way the special function of the life-ether among the other three, we are led to the term Word-ether' as an appropriate second name for it, corresponding to the term sound-ether for the chemical ether.
And there is in principle no limitation to the number of such seeds, each of which will bear the complete image of the archetype. The characteristics of the third modification of ether are such that they prompted Rudolf Steiner to give it as a second name, besides chemical ether, that of sound-ether.
Through its power to bind flowing action into solid form, the life-ether is related to the sound-ether in the same way as the articulated word formed by human speaking is related to the mere musical tone. The latter by itself is as it were fluid. In human speech this fluidity is represented by the vowels.
Attempts have been made to dismiss these suggestions by calling them 'mysticism' and 'mediaeval magic'. Both terms are titles of honour if we understand by the one the form of insight into the supersensible realm of nature acquired by the higher mode of reading, and by the other a faculty of nature herself, whose magic wand is the chemical or sound-ether.
Yet nature makes use of number as a regulating factor in quite a different way from its appearance in the purely electrical and gravitational connexions of inorganic matter, namely where sound-ether from the upper boundary of nature so regulates nature's dynamic that the manifold sense-qualities appear in their time-and-space order.
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