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As the originator of the secondary polarities in earthly nature the astral realm must undoubtedly itself be structured polarically, one part of it forming the cause of all the happenings by which levity is brought into interaction with gravity, the other of all the happenings by which gravity is brought into interaction with levity.

Rather must it carry certain qualities of levity which, together with those of gravity, appear in a polarically opposite manner at its two poles. As the result of a certain coupling with gravity, it too has somehow remained polarically split. This can easily be seen by considering the following.

But the eye receives also a flow of blood, and we know that throughout the threefold human organism the blood supplies the nervous system with building-up forces, polarically opposite to the destructive ones. In sleep, as we have already seen, the interruption of consciousness allows the blood to inundate the nervous system, as it were, with its healing, building-up activity.

This process, however, is altered when the bodies subjected to friction are opposed to each other in the sense of a salt-sulphur polarity. The effect then is that the liberated levity, under the influence of the peculiar tension between the two bodies, remains bound in the realm of substance and becomes itself split up polarically.

By our observation of the human organism, in relation both to the different functions of the soul and to the different main organic systems, we further recognized the fact that the ways in which body and soul are interrelated are polarically opposite in the region of the brain and nerves and in the region of the metabolic processes, which again results in two polarically opposite activities of the soul, mental on the one hand, and volitional on the other.

There is, to begin with, the fact that the colour-band visible on the observation screen is only apparently confined to the surface of the screen. For, as we have seen, because of the differing co-ordination of levity and gravity at the two ends of the spectrum, the conditions of space prevailing at each are polarically opposite.

Here we have an instance of a kind of polarity which belongs to the fundamentals of nature as much as does the levity-gravity polarity itself. Wherever two poles of a polarity meet, they have the possibility of being connected in two ways which in themselves are again polarically opposite.

To ignore this would be to violate one of the principles we have adopted from Goethe, which is never to derive fundamental concepts of nature from observations obtained under artificial conditions. Sulphur and phosphorus are thus seen to represent two polarically opposite tendencies with regard to the levity-gravity coherence which breaks up when combustion occurs.

While the system is kept in this condition, no consciousness can obtain in it. In between the two polarically opposite systems there is a third, again of clearly distinct character, which functions as a mediator between the two. Here all processes are of a strictly rhythmic nature, as is shown by the process of breathing and the pulsation of the blood.

We remember that, to form this faculty, two existing functions of the soul, as such polarically opposite, had to be welded together memory based on exact sense-perception and the freely working fantasy; one connected with the nervous system of the body, the other with the blood.