Elementary Beings @ 113
for all that is solid, from potato to ingot of gold; water all that is liquid,
from mother's milk to gasoline to molten lead; air all that is gaseous,
including all the chemical elements when in that stage; fire is the all-
pervading element that triggers the change from one elemental state to
the next. For spiritual science, fire is not, as with the physicist, a condi-
tion of movement, but something of its own, endowed with an even
finer substantiality than air, so rarefied it permeates all other elements,
warming or cooling by its presence or its absence. Everything that ex-
ists derives from condensed fire.
To spiritual science, elements and ethers work together in pairs: fire
with warmth-ether, air with light-ether, water with chemical-ether,
earth with life-ether, but from opposite polarities: elements function
upward from the center of the earth, ethers down from the celestial
sphere whence they originate. Fire, the subtlest of the elements, ex-
pands skyward, as in a candle or flaming oil well; fire's companion,
warmth-ether, radiates down from sun and stars, stimulating growth.
Air-with qualities and functions opposite to those of its etheric com-
panion, light-ether-fills all the space between things, thus connecting
them. Light-ether, on the contrary, is perceived on things, not in the
spaces between. Light-ether is seen as separating things, making them
distinguishable one from the other, creating distances and conditions of
space. Light and space being inseparable, where there is light there must
be space. Unlike light, air is chaotic, without direction. Its main char-
acteristic is elasticity; it can be diluted almost indefinitely without loos-
ing its cohesion. Light, the opposite of elast?c, is brittle and separable
and is directional as it streams from its source. Beat the air with a stick,
says Steiner's follower Ernst Marti, and the air gives way to reunite be-
hind the stick. Light is separated by a stick, and its rays do not reunite
but stream off in straight lines. Air from all sides presses toward the
earth, centripetally, but is not, as Steiner points out, compressible be-
yond a certain point; and by air, he means, of course, all that is gaseous.
The element ofwater, or all that is liquid, works like the other ele-
ments in opposition to its etheric partner, chemical-ether. Water is
dense, continuous, always tending to the spherical, consistent through-
out. Chemical-ether (or tone-ether, as Steiner sometimes calls it) is