11 6 D The Secret Lij2 ofNature
live interests them exceedingly.They are purely sense and understand-
ing, immediately taking in and understanding what they see and hear."
Because gnomes have this immediate understanding of what they
see, says Steiner, their knowledge is similar to that of humans, but
they look down on human understanding as not being complete,
laughing at our groping and struggling to understand. Having a direct
perception of what is comprehensible in the world, they have no need
for thought.They comprehend at sight, without needing to think, and
therefore find it entertaining to observe a human being "asleepm-not
in bed, but in his astral and ego bodies-for they see someone "who
thinks in the spirit but does not know it, does not know that his
thoughts are alive in the spirit world."
Strangely, in this anthroposophical view, the gnomes do not actually
seem to care much for the earth itself and would like to tear themselves
free of it. But the earth, says Steiner, holds over them the continuous
threat of forcing them to take a particular form, a form that gnomes do
not relish, especially forms of frogs or toads.Therefore, with the funda-
mental force of their being, they unceasingly thrust away from the
earth, and it is this thrusting, says Steiner, that determines the upward
direction of the plant's growth."Once a plant has grown upwards, once
it has left the domain of the gnomes and has passed out of the sphere
of the moist earthly element into the sphere of moist air, the plant de-
velops what comes to outer formation in the leaves." Here other be-
ings are at work, beginning with undines and sylphs.
Undines, as denizens of the chemical-ether, are active in the etheric
element of water, especially on the surface of drops or other liquid bod-
ies; their coiisciousness lives in the flow of the fluid element. "They are
the world's chemists, without whose activity no kind of transformation
of substance could be possible.They carry the action of chemical-ether
into the plants which would otherwise wither above ground if not ap-
proached on all sides by undines. In a tree they stream through the flu-
idity of its sap."
Seen clairvoyantly as they swim and sway through the element of
moisture, undines recoil from everything in the nature of the fish, as if
the fish form, like the frogs to the gnomes, were a threat to them.