In all older languages, the words used to designate the element bound up with breathing, or the act of breathing, served at the same time to express the relationship of man to the Divine, or even the Divine itself. One need think only of the words Brahma and Atma of the ancient Indians, the Pneuma of the Greeks, the Spiritus of the Romans. The Hebrews expressed the same idea when they said that Jehovah had breathed the breath of life into man and that man in this way became a living soul. What lies behind all these words is the feeling familiar to man in those times, that breathing was not only a means of keeping the body alive, but that a spiritual essence streamed in with the breath. So long as this condition prevailed, people could expect that by changing their manner of breathing they had a means of bringing the soul into stronger relationship with spiritual Powers, as is attempted in Eastern Yoga. Remembering the picture of man's spiritual-physical evolution which we have gained from earlier chapters, we are not astonished to find how different this early experience of the breathing process was from our own. Yet, together with the recognition of this difference there arises another question. Even if we admit that man of old was so organized that the experience of his own breathing process was an overwhelmingly spiritual one, it was, after all, the gaseous substance of the earth's atmosphere which he inhaled, and exhaled again in a transformed condition. What then was it that prevented men - apparently right up to the time of van Helmont - from gaining the slightest inkling of the materiality of this substance? To find an answer to this question, let us resort once more to our method of observing things genetically, combined with the principle of not considering parts without considering the whole to which they organically belong. In modern science the earth is regarded as a mineral body whereon the manifold forms of nature appear as mere additions, arising more or less by chance; one can very well imagine them absent without this having any essential influence on the earth's status in the universe. The truth is quite different. For the earth, with everything that exists on it, forms a single whole, just as each separate organism is in its own way a whole.