This shows that we have no right to imagine the earth without men, and to suppose that its cosmic conditions of being would then remain unaltered - any more than we can imagine a human being deprived of some essential-organ and remaining human. Mankind, and all the other kingdoms of nature, are bound up organically with the earth from the start of its existence. Moreover, just as the highest plants, seen with Goethe's eyes, are the spiritual originators of the whole realm of plants - the creative Idea determining their evolution - so we see man, the highest product of earth evolution, standing behind this evolution as its Idea from the first, and determining its course. The evolutionary changes which we observe in the earth and in man are in fact a single process, working through a variety of manifested forms.