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It is only in animal and man that we find the astral forces working in the form of separate astral bodies. This accounts for their capacity for sensation and volition. Besides the alternation of birth and death, they experience the rhythm of sleeping and waking. Sleep occurs when the astral body leaves the physical and etheric bodies in order to expand into its planetary mother-sphere, whence it gathers new energy. During this time its action on the physical-etheric aggregate remaining upon earth is similar to that of the astral cosmos upon the plant.
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Through Kepler’s third law a certain relation is expressed between the spatial dimensions of the different planetary spheres and the time needed by the relevant planet to circle once round the circumference of its own sphere. It says: ‘The squares of the periodic times of the planets are always in the same proportion as the cubes of their mean distances from the sun.’ In mathematical symbols this reads:
t12 / t22 = r13 / r23
We shall see later how Kepler arrived at this law. The point is that there is nothing in it which is not accessible to pure observation. Spatial distances and lengths of time are measured and the results compared. Nothing, for instance, is said about the dynamic cause of the movements. The assertion is restricted – and this is true also of the first and second law – to a purely kinematic content, and so precisely to what the earthly onlooker can apprehend. Now it is said that Kepler’s third law is a necessary consequence of Newton’s law of gravitation, and that – since it is based on pure observation – it therefore establishes the truth of Newton’s conception. In this assertion we encounter a misconception exactly like the one in the statement that the theorem of the parallelogram of forces follows by logical necessity from the theorem of the parallelogram of velocities. For:

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Again, in the animal kingdom the ego-principle works as an external force in the form of various group-soul activities which control and regulate the life of the different animal species. It is in the group-ego of the species that we have to look for the source of the wisdom-filled instincts which we meet in the single animals.

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Again, in the animal kingdom the ego-principle works as an external force in the form of various group-soul activities which control and regulate the life of the different animal species. It is in the group-ego of the species that we have to look for the source of the wisdom-filled instincts which we meet in the single animals.
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(a) The law of gravitation itself derives from Newton’s formula for the centripetal force acting at a point which moves along a circle, this formula being itself the result of an amplification of the formula for centripetal acceleration by the factor ‘mass’ (as if the latter were a pure number):

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Only in man does the ego-principle enter as an individual entity into the single physico-etheric-astral organism. Here, however, the succession of stages we have outlined comes to a conclusion. For with the appearance of the I as an individual principle, the preceding evolutionary process – or, more correctly, the involutionary process – begins to be reversed. In moving up from one kingdom to the next, we find always one more dynamic principle appearing in a state of separation from its mother-sphere; this continues to the point where the I, through uniting itself with a thus emancipated physico-etheric-astral organism, arrives at the stage of self-consciousness. Once this stage has been reached, however, it falls to the I to reverse the process of isolation, temporarily sanctioned by the cosmos for the sake of man.

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Only in man does the ego-principle enter as an individual entity into the single physico-etheric-astral organism. Here, however, the succession of stages we have outlined comes to a conclusion. For with the appearance of the I as an individual principle, the preceding evolutionary process - or, more correctly, the involutionary process - begins to be reversed. In moving up from one kingdom to the next, we find always one more dynamic principle appearing in a state of separation from its mother-sphere; this continues to the point where the I, through uniting itself with a thus emancipated physico-etheric-astral organism, arrives at the stage of self-consciousness. Once this stage has been reached, however, it falls to the I to reverse the process of isolation, temporarily sanctioned by the cosmos for the sake of man.