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In the three actual cloud-forms, gravity and levity are more or less in equilibrium, but in the nimbus gravity predominates, and the atmospheric vapour condenses accordingly into separate liquid bodies, the drops of rain. The polar opposite of this process must therefore be one in which cloud-vapour, under the dominating influence of levity, passes up through a transitional condition into a state of pure heat.

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Such a conception by no means contradicts the findings of external research. For meteorology has come to know of a heat-mantle surrounding the earth’s atmosphere for which various hypothetical explanations have been advanced. Naturally, none of them envisages the possibility of atmospheric substance changing into the heat-condition and back again. But if we learn to look on the chain of cloud-forms as a ‘spiritual ladder’, then we must expect the chain to conclude with a stage of pure heat, lying above the cirrus-sphere.⁹

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The line of consideration pursued in the last part of this chapter has led us from certain observations in the plant kingdom, concerning the coming into being of ponderable matter from ‘nothing’, to a corresponding picture of the earth’s meteorological sphere. When discussing the plant in this respect we found as an instance ‘worth a thousand, bearing all within itself the case of Tillandsia and more particularly the surprising appearance of phosphorus in it. Now, in the meteorological realm it is once more phosphorus which gives us an instance of this kind. For there is the well-known fact of the presence of phosphorus in conspicuous quantities in snow without a source being traceable in the atmosphere whence this substance can have originated in ponderable condition. The phosphorus appearing in snow, therefore, brings before our very eyes the fact that the heights of the atmosphere are a realm of procreation of matter. (In our next chapter we shall learn what it is in phosphorus that makes it play this particular role in both fields of nature. What interests us in the present context is the fact itself.)

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The knowledge we have now gained concerning the disappearance and appearance of physical water in the heights of the atmosphere will enable us to shake off one of the most characteristic errors to which the onlooker-consciousness has succumbed in its estimation of nature. This is the interpretation of thunderstorms, and particularly of lightning, which has held sway since the days of Benjamin Franklin.

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Before developing our own picture of a thunderstorm let us recognize that science has found it necessary to reverse the explanation so long in Vogue. Whereas it was formerly taken for granted – and the assumption was supposed to rest upon experimental proof – that the condensing of atmospheric vapour which accompanied lightning was the consequence of a release of electrical tension by the lightning, the view now held is that the electrical tension responsible for the occurrence of lightning is itself the effect of a sudden condensing process of atmospheric moisture.

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The reason for this uncertainty is that the physical conditions in the sphere where lightning occurs, according to other experiences of electric phenomena, actually exclude the formation of such high tensions as are necessary for the occurrence of discharges on the scale of lightning. If we look at this fact without scientific bias we are once again reminded of the Hans Andersen child. We cannot help wondering how this child would behave in a physics class if the teacher, after vainly trying to produce a lightning-flash in miniature with the help of an electrical machine, explained that the moisture prevalent in the air was responsible for the failure of the experiment, and that he would have to postpone it to a day when the air was drier. It would scarcely escape the Hans Andersen child that the conditions announced by the teacher as unfavourable to the production of an electric spark by the machine, prevail in a much higher degree exactly where lightning, as a supposed electric spark, actually does occur.

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In the preceding chapter we drew attention to the fact that any spatially extended mass is under the sway of both gravity and levity. We then saw that with the transition of matter from the solid via the liquid to the gaseous state, not only does the specific gravity of the substance decrease, but at the same time an increase takes place of what we might call ‘specific levity’. In the gaseous state, therefore, we find gravity-bound matter becoming so far levity-bound that it assumes the property of actively expanding in space.