The Life-Giving.

The man-conquering: after

The centaurs learnt

The power

Of the honey-sweet wine, suddenly they thrust

The white milk with their hands, the table away, spontaneously,

And drinking out of silver horns

Intoxicated themselves.

The concept of the centaurs is surely that of the spirit of a river insofar as it forms a path and a boundary, with violence, on the originally pathless and upwards growing earth.

Its image is therefore at places in nature where the shore is rich in cliffs and grottoes, especially at places where originally the river had to leave the mountain chain and had to cut across its direction.

Hence centaurs are also originally teachers of the science of nature, because nature can best be examined from that viewpoint.

In regions such as this the river had originally to wander about aimlessly before it could tear out a course. By this means there formed, as beside ponds, damp meadows and caves in the earth for suckling creatures, and meanwhile the centaur was a wild herdsman, like the Odyssean Cyclops. The waters longingly sought their direction. But the more firmly the dry land took shape upon the banks and secured its direction by means of the firmly rooting trees, by bushes and grapevines, the more the river also, which took its motion from the shape of the bank, had to gain its direction until, forced on from its origin, it broke through at a point where the mountains that enclosed it were most loosely connected.