The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I said yesterday that these studies are intended to lead us on to a clarification of the essential nature of the remedies we have proposed, and we will continue to pursue this theme. Today I would like to begin by mentioning something that can suggest a great deal regarding our method of working.

In approaching an illness or a complex of symptoms with imaginative observation, we frequently receive a direct, intuitive knowledge of the remedy. Then we obviously attempt to think about the matter in accordance with judgments connected with the matter by external scientific knowledge, and we find we are wrong, that it cannot be so. This is an experience frequently encountered by one who is able to make occult investigations, and it also applies to domains other than therapeutics. Only on thinking more about the matter, pursuing it still further, does one come to see how correct one actually was. What is discovered by imaginative investigation followed by intuition is always correct, provided, of course, that it is based on sound powers of cognition. But one's judgment activity must first wrestle through—if I may put it so—to what one comes to know in this way.

It must first be realized that this human organism is complicated to the highest degree, so that in fact an intellectual grasp of it presents the greatest conceivable difficulties, especially if one tries to relate this human organism to the outer world again. This is especially noticeable if we examine more closely the function of nitrogen in the human organism. Earlier in these lectures, I reported that nitrogen is found in greater quantity in exhaled air than in inhaled air and materialistic thinking can hardly help regarding the difference as unimportant. The reason for this is that the materialistic view of the human being is basically unable to discover the function of nitrogen. This is possible only if the following is considered:

You know that the most varied theories exist about nutrition and that, accordingly, investigators often hold diametrically opposed views regarding the question: ”What is the function in the human organism of protein in food? Why does the human organism need protein?” Some say that the structure of man's protein organism is constant, or at least relatively constant, and that the protein absorbed undergoes rapid disintegration and has little significance for the plastic, constructive forces of protein in the human organism. Others hold the view—regarded somewhat out of date today—that the proteinaceous body of the human being is continually disintegrating and built up again from the protein absorbed. These diametrically opposed theories are put forward in the most varied forms, but both miss the essential point, because they compare protein with protein in a one-sided way without considering the human organism as a whole.

In this human organism we have to do with an opposition between the head formation, and therefore the formation of nerves and senses, and the formation proceeding from the metabolic-limb system. This is a polar opposition within human nature, and we cannot pay enough attention to it. Without taking into account what I have just said, we cannot understand the sequence of stages in the build-up of man that are so important in therapeutic deliberations. For instance, one will not be able to understand the real relationship of the lung to the entire human organism unless one's investigations begin in the following way. If we are considering the head organism, certain forces obviously predominate there. Next we have the chest organism containing the lungs. The lung is an organ that also has forces of head formation within it, though to a lesser degree. The whole human organism has everywhere these same forces, but in varying intensities. And if we investigate how the ego, astral body, and etheric body work in the whole plastic formation and deformation of the organs, we are brought to the paradoxical statement that the lung formation is a less intensive head formation. The lung formation is a metamorphosis of the head formation, only it is arrested at an earlier stage. The head advances further with regard to the same formative forces that are present in the lung but remain there at an earlier stage.

Because the lung has remained a kind of retarded metamorphosis of the head formation it is adapted to its own function, i.e., breathing. If the same forces that remain retarded in the lung, making it suitable for breathing, develop further, they render the lung more and more head-like. A consequence of the lung becoming more and more head-like is that it takes in thought forces—the organic forces of thinking—and strives to become a thinking organ. In trying to become a thinking organ, taking up too strongly the forces properly seated in the head, the lung becomes disposed to tuberculosis.

Pulmonary tuberculosis can only be understood in this way, proceeding from the entire human being. It can certainly be understood if we realize that in a tuberculous lung breathing strives to become thinking. In the head, breathing is metamorphosed, and all functions of thinking, even the processing of perceptions, are nothing but breathing developed further in an upward direction. The head is an advanced respiratory organ, having moved beyond the lung stage, but it represses breathing and, instead of taking in air, takes in etheric forces through the senses. Sense perception is nothing but a more refined—which means extending more into the etheric—respiratory process. Thus head and lung breathe. There is something else in the human being that is also breathing, something that remains at a still lower stage in this process of metamorphosis: the liver. The liver is a lung that has not reached its final development, it is a head formation not fully developed. It also breathes, but now the other metamorphosis, the polar metamorphosis of the sense perceptions—that is, taking in food and working it through—predominates in the liver. Therefore lung and liver formations lie in the middle between the stomach and the brain and head formations.

If you lay a foundation with such thoughts, you will not be far from understanding what I have to say about certain human organs really being organs of respiration. All those organs that are shaped like the brain, lung, and liver are at the same time organs of respiration, but they have a tendency to breathe out. Thus they also excrete carbon dioxide externally. Such external excretion of carbon dioxide is the essential thing in breathing. These organs absorb oxygen and give off carbon dioxide, and this holds good not only for the lung but for the entire organism, for every organ. It is essentially an activity of the astral body, which develops its activity in sympathy and antipathy. Sympathy as a force corresponds to inhalation; antipathy as a force corresponds to exhalation of the astral body. In the description of the astral body given in my book, Theosophy, you find that it is permeated by the forces of antipathy and sympathy. It works in the human being in the whole breathing process according to antipathy and sympathy. This must be regarded as the inner activity of the astral body.

And now we come to the final point of these considerations. The proteinaceous content present in the human being, in so far as it belongs to the organs described, is essentially for the support of breathing and manifests outwardly through breathing. But everything that manifests outwardly also expresses itself inwardly. This is how I would sketch it schematically. If you have here a human organ rich in protein and belonging to the group of organs I mentioned, it manifests outwardly by developing the activity of breathing (see drawing, red). But in breathing outward, it unfolds another activity within, the polar activity to breathing, namely, the activity liberating the soul, liberating the spirit. An activity freeing the soul: in breathing out, in unfolding the act of breathing in an outward direction, you unfold inwardly a soul-spiritual activity. This does not require space, of course; on the contrary, in space it disappears continually, passing out of three-dimensional space. This activity manifests within, however—in an inward direction—and to develop this activity within is essentially the function of human protein. What functions as an activity in the head enters from outside by way of the senses. Hence the head organs are the organs containing least of what is spiritual. They absorb the spirit from outside, acquiring it for themselves by means of the senses. The head is the least spiritual organ in the human being.

By contrast, man's spirituality—that is, the development of spirit within, the development of spirituality in the body, of real spirit, not abstract spirit—begins in the pulmonary system and works from outside inward in contrast to breathing. The most spiritual organs are those belonging to the liver system. These are the organs that develop the most spiritual activity in an inward direction. This also explains why “head men” are often materialistic, because only the external spirituality can be worked through with the head, and in this way one is wrongly led to believe that everything spiritual that is developed is received from outside, from the world of the senses. If a person is a real intellectual, then he becomes at the same time a materialist. The more one is a “head thinker,” the more one is disposed to become a materialist. On the other hand, if the whole human being struggles to attain knowledge, if a person begins to develop a consciousness of the way the entire human being thinks, including the organs situated further back, materialism ceases to be justifiable.

The activity manifesting in breathing is also revealed outwardly in the excretion of carbon in carbon dioxide. But the inward activity of spiritualization is bound up with nitrogen. The nitrogen that has been used in spiritualization is eliminated, and the degree to which nitrogen is eliminated is a measure of the inner work of the human organs in the direction of spirituality. You can conclude from this that one who does not believe in such spirituality will obviously have to remain very unclear about the absorption of nitrogen in the human organism. The role played by nutrition can be clarified only if one knows how in all protein formation there unfolds an activity directed outward and one directed inward. If you study this process, which is essentially a breathing process with its polar opposite, you will realize that nutrition and digestion border everywhere on the breathing processes, that nutrition and digestion everywhere encounter the processes of breathing and spiritualization.

In this process of spiritualization, and therefore on the other side of breathing, are found the real shaping, plastic forces in protein formation: there we find everything that shapes the human being. From this you will also be able to see that what is active here points to an interaction between the astral and etheric bodies. The astral body is active in breathing by means of sympathy and antipathy; the etheric body is active through encountering in its activity the sympathies and antipathies of the astral body. Everywhere the etheric body with its activities hits up against the breathing process in the human organism. These etheric activities have their primary point of attack in the fluid constituents in the human being. As you know, at least two-thirds of the human body consists of water, and in this water-organism the etheric body is chiefly active. The etheric forces express themselves physically in this water-organism. The forces of breathing find expression in the air organism built into the human being. Thus we may regard what takes place between the astral body and the etheric body as an interaction between water forces and air forces.

This interaction of air and water forces is continually ongoing in the human organism. Of course, neither completely suppresses the other; hence we always inhale traces of water vapor with the air. There the etheric element encroaches on the breathing. Similarly, the breathing activity encroaches on the digestive and nutritive organs. In so far as you are formed out of protein, you also breathe. Thus these activities always overlap, and we are always faced with a predominance of one activity or another in one organ or another. There is nothing here that can be described in a one-sided way. We can never describe this or that organ as being exclusively a respiratory organ. If we maintain this about the lung, we are in error. The other activity is always there, even if to a lesser degree. Nutrition takes place primarily through an activity that impresses itself on the fluid-etheric and on the solid-physical. Therefore nutritive and digestive activities occur primarily in the ethericfluid and the physical-solid, whereas the main respiratory activity is developed in the astral-airy, and the main ego activity, the actual spiritual activity, unfolds in the warmth conditions connected with the ego itself. Spiritual activity within the physical organism is a cooperation of the ego with warmth conditions, i.e., with all those organizations where warmth can work into the physical. The ego must always go hand in hand with warmth, must always operate through warmth. If we put a patient to bed and tuck him in, this is simply an appeal to the ego to make use of the warmth generated in an appropriate way.

These considerations provide insight into human nutrition in general. Nutrition is an interaction between tissue fluid—i.e., the watery constituent in which nutrition and elimination chiefly take place—and the protein organism of the human being. The latter is, relatively speaking, extraordinarily stable; it is labile in a certain respect only during the period of growth, then becomes stable and undergoes a kind of disintegration during the second half of life. In the tissue fluid there is a continual assimilation and disintegration of the protein in food. It is in this activity that attacks are made on that which wants to remain stable in protein formation: the human being's inner proteinaceous organs generally; they want to remain stable. This is because they wish to liberate soul-spiritual activity inwardly, to isolate it within. What is achieved through the process of nutrition is this continual interaction between the extraordinarily mobile play of forces, constituted by this active assimilation and disintegration of protein, and the play of forces striving towards rest that arise in this interplay of the inner protein in the human being. Hence it is partly a superstition, partly correct, to say that the human being builds up his body through the substances he absorbs from his food. It is a superstition because the constructive forces are already present in his proteinaceous body simply by virtue of the fact that a human being is a human being; on the other hand, the human being unfolds an activity from the other pole, which conducts a continual attack on this stability of his own proteinaceous formation.

We may say then that it is incorrect to believe that human life is maintained only by the consumption of food. This is simply not correct. It would be just as correct to say that life is maintained by the active interplay of forces in the tissue fluids. When you give food which stimulates this activity in the tissue fluids, you maintain life. This does not happen by merely introducing food substances into the body but by the encounter with the stable forces of its own proteinaceous constituents. This is a process that you stimulate by absorbing food, and this process is the most fundamental factor in the maintenance of life. Here, too, we find that we have to look at the process. It can be, for example, that substances we know to be effective in children do not necessarily act in the same way in an adult; for a child is developing his body and needs the introduction of substances and the unfolding of their forces in an inward direction. If you know that something is effective as substance in a child, it will not be similarly effective in the adult. In an adult, it may be much more necessary simply to maintain and stimulate the forces in his tissue fluids that are striving toward rest.

If you now study everything that takes place in the human organs with a backward orientation, as it were (the head is also such an organ), everything taking place in the lungs and liver, and then turn your attention to those more embedded in this activity of the tissue fluids, you will find the heart enclosed by the lungs as the archetypal organ. The human heart is entirely formed out of the activity of tissue fluid, and its activity is no more than the reflection of this inner activity.

The heart is not a pump! I have often said this; it is rather an apparatus for sensing or registering the activity in the tissue fluid. The heart is moved by the circulation of the blood; it is not the pumping action of the heart that moves the blood. The heart has no more to do with human circulation than a thermometer does with the production of outer heat or cold. Just as the thermometer is nothing more than an instrument for registering the degree of heat or cold, so your heart is nothing more than an apparatus for registering what takes place in the circulation and what flows into this from the metabolic system. This is a golden rule that we must heed if we wish to understand the human being. In the belief, that the heart is a pump driving the blood through the blood vessels, we can see how modern natural science reverses the truth. Anyone believing in this superstition about the heart ought to be consistent and believe that it is warmer in his room because the thermometer has risen! This is the consistent conclusion of such an approach.

You can see to what results one is led by views that simply do not take into account what is by far the most significant aspect of man's being: the soul and spirit. Such views ignore the mobile, the dynamic aspects and proceed from what is merely material, trying to draw from the substance itself those forces that are only imprinted on the substance. Such views want to attribute to the heart the forces that are only imprinted upon it by the dynamics, by the play of forces in the human body.

In the heart activity and in the heart organ we really have the most advanced organization of what is placed over against respiration and the liberation of the spirit in man. This may now be called a polar metamorphosis, in contrast to a mere transformation. In the head, lung, and liver, you have various stages of metamorphic transformations. But as soon as you study the heart in relation to the lungs, you have to speak about a polar metamorphosis, for the heart in its formation is the polar opposite of the lung.

All those organs that develop in a more forward direction—for example, the female uterus, which is the most prominent example—are then further transformations, step by step, of the heart formation. (I speak of the “female uterus,” because there is also a “male uterus,” but this is only present in the male as part of the etheric body.) The uterus is nothing other than a transformed heart. With this method of studying things, we can gain all that is necessary to understand this organization in the human being.

The fats and carbohydrates now intervene in this other activity that has its center in the heart—if I may put it so—and comes to rest in the heart's movement. The fats and carbohydrates exert their activity here. Of course, this extends over the whole body, because the whole body deposits substance and is a functional outcome of systems of forces directed toward combustion, just as the whole body breathes and develops what is spiritual.

This sheds some light on pulmonary tuberculosis and we will see how such an inner study of the human organism leads us further and further toward therapeutic matters. What was formerly called consumption—and has now been labelled tuberculosis for purely theoretical reasons—is really due to man's being cut off from the extra-terrestrial and confined to the earthly through various influences such as poor housing and so on. All descriptions of pulmonary tuberculosis can be summed up by saying that the patient is being cut off from the sun and cosmic space and is drawn toward what is cutting him off. He is drawn toward that which paralyzes his delight in the extra-terrestrial. This delight depends essentially on sense perception. The patient's soul cannot penetrate to the senses and retreats down into the lungs, so that the lungs strive to become an organ of thought, to become a head. This is, in fact, revealed clearly even in the pathological manifestations. In wanting to become a head they take on a form and one can see that the forces tending to ossify the human head then come to expression in the lungs, resulting in indurations, consolidations, tuberculomas, and the like.

How can this tendency be opposed? If you want to work against this tendency of the lung to become “head,” you must realize first of all that we have to do with a weakening of the required astral activity and with an excessive strengthening of the ego activity. This activity of the ego begins to overpower the astral activity. This must be remedied. Sense impressions from outside especially stimulate ego activity, but sense impressions from outside pass into the whole human organism by bringing about salt depositions. These are not properly regulated in a person with a tendency to pulmonary tuberculosis. Hence you must help in such a case by using rather strong salt rubbings to try to oppose, at the right moment, what the lung can no longer oppose. Salt rubbings, applied from outside, oppose the consolidating processes acting from within. Of course, one must form the whole treatment in such a way that the organism is inclined to receive what is introduced in the effects of salt from outside. The patient could also take salt baths, strong salt baths, but then the organism must be led to become disposed to work upon the salt within, i.e., to respond from inside.

Here we can be led to the following considerations, which follow partly from our discussions last year. If you wish to stimulate the organism to develop an activity from within that interacts with and regulates certain outer organizing forces, you must give mercury in small doses, i.e., in doses approaching the homeopathic. Mercury is an important remedy in this direction, an important means for regulating this. Here you will have to take into account something of general importance regarding dosages. Putting together all I have presented, you can conclude that the system most similar to outer nature is the metabolic-limb system. If something is lacking there, you must use the lowest potencies. As soon as you have to deal with the middle system, you need intermediate potencies. When you have to work with the head, when something has to do with the spiritual in the head, you have to work with the highest potencies. But in this case we are dealing with the lung activity, i.e., with a part of the middle human being, and an intermediate dosage of mercury must be used.

Whenever one intends to work primarily upon the head organization and from there back upon the entire organism, the highest potencies are required. These will be particularly beneficial in cases where one believes that something can be achieved with compounds of silica. Silica compounds require the greatest dilution by their very nature, for they always rise toward the head and the periphery of the body, which belongs to the head system. On the other hand, when you have occasion for other reasons to administer calcium compounds, you will usually do right not to use the highest potencies but lower ones. In short, the potency required will be determined by whether, in your view, you have to act on the metabolic-limb organism, the middle, rhythmic organism, or the head organism. You must bear in mind, of course, that the head organism works powerfully upon the whole organism from the other direction. For example, you may believe a patient to be suffering from a foot disease, but actually this may be a disguised head disease, having its origins in the head. In such a case you will have to effect a cure not from the metabolism but from the head. Thus one must use high—but not too high—potencies of a substance perhaps known to be valuable in lower potencies in cases that have to be treated from the metabolism. Gradually a rationale can be introduced into these deliberations, and this must be done. The details will become clear only when you consider precise observations yielded by experiments. The investigations must pursue these details in the directions I have suggested.

Only an individual who can carefully retain in his memory all that his experience has taught him will be able to speak about healing in detail. Every individual experience is obviously instructive and bears fruit for further experiences. If you consider then what I have said, it will no longer appear so puzzling that there are diseases that, for instance, attack the brain and the liver simultaneously, for the liver is only a metamorphosed brain. If you therefore find deterioration of the liver together with degeneration of the cerebral ganglia, these conditions run in the same direction, and you have a form of disease that is an intensification of what causes pulmonary tuberculosis. It is only an intensified metamorphosis of pulmonary tuberculosis. Hence internally you will have to give stronger doses of mercury. Regarding external treatment, you should not be content with salt rubbings and with baths of table salt (sodium chloride); instead you will have to use calcium salts.

You see now, however, that sources of error are everywhere, and one really finds what is right only if the human organism is studied from within. Imagine that someone can go and say, “Here is a disease that I will cure with mercury,” he may achieve some success. The disease, however, may have nothing to do with syphilis, but at some point this person got the idea that when mercury effects a cure, the disease must be connected with syphilitic processes. This is not necessarily the case at all. You will now better understand what I said last year when I spoke of "mental illnesses." Of course I meant paralytic disease when I spoke a few days ago of softening of the brain, but the description is not so vivid if one uses the word “paralysis.” One always has the feeling that one is dropping into a description of the outer complex of symptoms.

Questions now arise regarding what I said last year about the actual causes of psychological diseases. As I said then, these have to be looked for in deformations of the organs. One gets nowhere if one merely takes into account the psychological symptoms. Similar psychological complexes can even be traced back to totally different causes of illness. Especially in so-called mental illnesses we are led more and more to deformations of the organs, to an organ that is not functioning properly, and then the question arises as to why the organ is not functioning properly. It is because the stable—not the variable—forces in protein formation have become defective. Something in the patient is therefore continually striving to destroy the original plastic structure of the affected organ. Therefore it does no good to look for the cause in what is going on in the tissue fluid, which presents the other pole, the metabolism. If we proceed from the symptoms, it will not help us to study what is presented by the metabolism itself within the organism. Instead it is exceptionally important in trying to gain knowledge of mental illnesses to study the excretions. An important reference point will always be found there. It is of tremendous importance to investigate the excretions of mental patients, for—as I said last year—in certain forms of mental illness there is a compulsive tendency to form imaginations, inspirations. This is what “freeing the spiritual within” signifies.

This tendency is there because the organ has become defective. If the organ were not defective, if it were constituted normally, it would indeed form imaginations, but these would remain unconscious. When the organ has become defective, it is not able to form imaginations correctly. On the one hand, the organ is defective and the tendency to form imaginations arises; on the other hand, imaginations remain uncovered by the organ, and hallucinations arise. You could say then, that when we have an organ with imaginations developing within it (see drawing, red) which radiate through the rest of the human organism (see drawing, bright) and become perceptible, we are dealing with a deformed organ. The formation of imaginations (red) cannot unfold properly in its plasticity. As a result, because the imaginative activity is abnormal, it intrudes upon consciousness, and visions and hallucinations arise. On the other hand, the organ is damaged, and this gives rise to an urge to form correct imaginations. Only by seeing through these things from within can they be explained.

We will proceed tomorrow to answer individual questions that have been posed and to an explanation of our remedies.

In turning our attention now to the study of remedies, we will also discuss the remedies we have already introduced. I have no interest, of course, in describing how the idea forms in me that this or that can be a remedy. Instead I want you to come to an insight into why this or that substance can be used as a remedy. I would like the perception of the remedial value of a substance to be formed, as it were, in your own souls. Therefore I would like to direct the discussion today in such a way that we undertake a theoretical investigation of how one arrives at the view that something can be used as a remedy.

Of course it must be stated at the outset that an acquaintance with the main principles of an anthroposophical knowledge of the human being provides the basis for this. A correct interpretation of remedies can arise only if one is impelled from the ground up to conduct the whole investigation in an anthroposophical sense. Thus you will also see that what I have said in the last few days will flow into the theoretical investigations presented today.

Let us proceed from the fact that the interaction between the human being and his environment can be studied by investigating the plants. By first comprehending the processes in the plant world, one acquires a correct insight into the continuation of mineralizing processes into the inner aspects of the human being. In presenting this type of investigation, however, we must realize that something shaped out of the whole cosmos is at work in the entire process of plant formation—in the formation of roots, leaves, blossoms, seeds, and so on. This follows from everything we have studied in the last few days. This process that tends particularly to shaping the plants, even to shaping them inwardly, cannot be replaced by an artificial synthesis, by a chemical synthesis. At most, it can only be replaced in this way in very few cases. For example one must be clear about the following: In the roots of a plant we have to do with the part of the plant-forming process that is bound to the more-or-less inner forces of the earth's surface. Soul-spiritually, the human being is a being growing in a plant-like fashion from above downward. His head harbors many of the forces that interact with the forces of the earth itself. There is a deep kinship between that which shapes the root in plants and all the forces of the human head. Thus, when clear ideas need to be gained about the process that takes place in root formation in plants, it must always be realized that this process has a reciprocal relation to the human head.

Let us examine the root of gentian (gentiana lutea) as an example of how to explore such matters. Gentian is a plant in which the blossoming forces come to strong outward expression. Therefore in the root we will find forces that tend very strongly toward the blossoming element. In other words, the root's forces are somewhat weak, a great deal is expended in the direction of blossoming and leaf formation. Nevertheless, the whole form of the blossom shows that the root nature is still present very strongly. Thus we cannot count on gentian, as a matter of course, strongly affecting the activities in the human organization proceeding directly from the head, i.e., as outer physical effects. Rather we should expect gentian to act on what supports breathing from out of the head. Since effects in the organism always are polaric, we must imagine that especially the digestive organs begin to breathe very strongly in the way I explained yesterday if we administer gentian roots. This stimulates an active breathing activity in the stomach and intestines, but we must keep in mind what we have learned in these lectures regarding the necessity of first treating the plant substances if these are to stimulate this breathing activity. We must boil the roots, and administer the decoction.

Let us now turn to some external aspects of the plant. We notice that the gentian root has a bitter taste and a strong smell; thus it acts very strongly on the astral. We therefore have an effect on the astral nature in the digestive realm of the human being. Moreover, gentian root contains sugar. You will recall that I have frequently pointed out how the process of working through sugar in the human organization involves a strong stimulation of ego activity. I have said that you can study this even in external statistics. For example, Eastern Europeans and Russians, in whom the ego activity is somewhat withdrawn, use a very small quantity of sugar each year, whereas the statistics show a greater consumption of sugar the further West we go, i.e., among the English, in whom the ego develops an extraordinarily vigorous activity. Such things must certainly be taken into account if one wishes to gain knowledge in the world.

Gentian root is also rich in fatty oils. Fatty oils, when passing through digestion, have a strong effect on the lower breathing, since fatty oil intensifies the mobility, the inner mobility, of the stomach and intestinal organs. Therefore you can see how it is possible really to describe what is taking place in the human organism. One notices at once that the astral activity is stimulated and therefore that the breathing mobility of the stomach and intestinal tract is stimulated. One can therefore say that the intestines develop a greater activity and the stomach is strengthened. This whole effect is the result when the astral body is strengthened generally. The whole effect calls forth mineralizing processes, but only to the extent that these solidify the organs and make them stronger. This is the slight influence of the ego acting through the sugar. Thus if we use a decoction of gentian roots, we stimulate the activity of the astral body and, acting through the sugar content of the root, allow the ego to assist.

There is a danger, however, of the ego going too far. If the ego continues to work below like a whip, a reaction is set up polarically in the head, and one can observe that such patients suffer from headaches as a side-effect. Nevertheless, the effects I have mentioned are produced. We observe an intestinal activity that is essentially of an enhancing, stimulating character, and we will use such a remedy, either alone or in some combination, if we notice that an illness manifests in connection with loss of appetite or dyspepsia, and especially if there is a generally sluggish digestive activity. In this way the metabolism is inwardly stimulated and becomes more active. By this means we can therefore work against tendencies toward gout and rheumatic conditions. In addition, in applying gentian root we will have made appropriate use of something that has a mildly antipyretic effect. This is because the deficient intestinal activity induces a reaction in the upper human being, and the febrile activity proceeds from this. Thus if we strengthen the lower human being, creating a counterweight to the upper human being, we have introduced an antipyretic activity.

This is the approach we must take if we wish to come to concrete relationships of the outer world to what is within the human being. It is quite correct to draw attention to currents acting on the human being from outside. In this respect, a man like Rosenbach has made remarkably good preliminary studies. However, if we only speak about these currents in abstractions, we do not at first realize that what acts from outside emerges from concrete things. It emerges from the fact that such relationships prevail between the root-nature of the plant world, the forces that are active in the root nature, and these forces once they have entered the human being. In this way we grasp things that otherwise are only characterized abstractly as currents. Spiritual science is concerned with working out of concrete processes.

Let us study a most instructive plant from this standpoint—the clove [clove root] (geum urbanum). We will again take the root and prepare a decoction from it. It is extraordinarily interesting if you investigate the clove root and recall something of what was said about the gentian root. Of course we must again assume an interaction with the head forces, because we are dealing with the root. Now clove root has a tart taste, exceptionally tart. In clove root we have etheric oils, i.e., oils that we must assume act on those parts of the organism not situated close to or within the intestinal tract, like those we spoke of in discussing the root of the gentian. Rather we have more to do with what should take place in the stomach, or perhaps only in the esophagus. We must also take into account another most essential fact here, namely the starch present in the clove root. Therefore we must appeal to forces that work in a more intensive way than the forces that are necessary to digest sugar. To digest starch, the process has to begin earlier. The sugar has first to be produced. You see, one must really pursue the processes in detail.

The clove root also contains tannin, and this too we must take into consideration if we wish to investigate the remedial effect of anything. Tannin points to the fact that the starch is working more toward the physical, becoming something that cultivates that which opposes even tannin. In the case of the clove root, then, the whole effect must be ascribed more to the ego than to the astral body. We have here an intensification of the ego's activity. Because of this, we have to do with what takes place in the lower human organism. This effect is a complete polar opposite to the stimulation of the head that takes place through the ego. We have to do with what I would like to call the outer digestion, laying hold of substances while still in the stomach, before they have gone over into the intestinal activity. Every system extends through the entire human organism, and the part of the nerve-sense apparatus still present in the intestines and digestive organs is stimulated; we therefore have to do with a predominance of the ego's influence.

What is the consequence of this? First, we have in clove root a strong antipyretic force; second, by working on the earlier digestive processes we can affect those later on, i.e., the actual intestinal activity. We give the intestinal activity less to do. In this way we can combat diarrhea in particular, and also mucous discharges from the intestines, for these things are due to overburdening the inner digestive activity. Thus you see that these investigations lead to a perception of the way outer forces penetrate what is within the human being.

This study of roots is of special significance, so let us take another root, for example the the root of iris germanica. Here we will also prepare a decoction from the root. The iris shows us even by its outer manifestation that it works strongly on the ego. The repulsive smell and bitter taste of the root reveal at once that the ego here interacts strongly and physically with the outer world. In the iris root there is something that stimulates this physical activity very much, that is, tannic acid. We also find something else that works upon the ego activity: starches. Finally, we find something that, through its physical effect, has an influence wherever it is stimulated to do so; we have resins in the iris root. Through all this the ego is brought into an especially lively activity. This lively activity of the ego—this driving force of the ego—can be noticed first in the urine activity, where a purgative, diuretic effect appears. These are outward expressions of ego activity.

We can find the conditions treatable by this remedy if we simply ask, “What is the human organism suffering from when these things are not in order?” The answer is dropsy and similar conditions. In decoctions of iris root we therefore have something with which we should try to combat dropsy and similar edematous conditions.

In taking a step upward in our study of the plants, let us consider the green leafy parts of the plant. We will take a characteristic plant like marjoram (majorana origanum). We must realize, when we come to the leaf, that nature herself completes certain processes that we must first carry to completion in the roots. When we take the leaf therefore, it is not good to prepare a decoction directly. We need the finer forces of the leaf and can obtain these by preparing an infusion. The forces that we really need are made available through preparing the leaf in an infusion. Here again you can grasp what we are dealing with by means of the senses. The infusion of marjoram has the peculiar flavor that might be called the “warming” flavor. At the same time, it has a certain bitterness. Then you have the aromatic smell, the ethereal oil, that proves so clearly that here something is working outward. In addition, you have something that need only be added to intensify all this, but whose physical effect does not manifest as early as other products. This aspect does not appear in its physical effect until it has passed through the stomach and has reached the intestines. These are the various kinds of salts present in the leaf, especially in marjoram. You may therefore say that this leaf-infusion has a particularly strong effect on the breathing activity of the inner organs: it calls forth a certain breathing activity in the inner organs. This finds expression in the sweat-provoking effect of this infusion, i.e., the inner organic activity in the form of breathing is stimulated. It has a diaphoretic effect, and the reaction therefore strengthens the activity of the inner organs. With infusions of marjoram leaves, one can work on the one hand against upper respiratory congestions, rhinitis, etc. and on the other hand against uterine weaknesses.

All this will become clearer when we move on to the effect of blossoms. Let us look at this effect in an instance where the plant shows it with special clearness, for example, where many small blossoms are clustered together in an inflorescence, as in the elder (sambucus nigra) or lilac. Let us be quite clear that here the plant is penetrated by precisely those forces that have a great deal to do with the environment of the earth, that contain cosmic influences, cosmic radiations. From this we note that elder flowers also contain ethereal oils. We notice it particularly from the fact that these flowers contain sulfur. In these flowers we therefore have something from the mineral kingdom that proves especially effective if we wish to stimulate breathing, but now from the other side: to stimulate the actual breathing organization, whereas earlier we spoke of stimulating breathing in the digestive organs and organs near them, before the breathing of the actual respiratory organs intervened. When we use elder flowers in the form of an infusion we stimulate particularly the etheric activity of the human organism, and only by way of this etheric activity do we stimulate the activity of the astral body. It is especially the breathing in the upper, posterior organs that is stimulated, not so much the head organs as those belonging to the actual respiration. Of course, reactions such as purging and sweating naturally appear everywhere. Now, however, the organs of breathing are stimulated. The normal breathing activity is intensified and—because this has to have an effect on the blood—the blood circulation is stimulated from inside the human being.

We can immediately conclude from these observations that it is possible to work against catarrhs by such means, and also inhibited sweat-formation, hoarseness, and coughing. And, because the effect that before appeared directly, now appears polarically, we can also use this remedy in rheumatic conditions. It is always a question of determining what curative forces a remedy may contain from the way it acts.

Let us now consider situations in which it may be necessary to act especially upon the head organization. What is it that really depends on the head organization? Digestion, its polar opposite, depends on it. Indeed, the cruder digestive processes, the cause of so many serious illnesses, depend on the head organization. Hence we must realize that we can influence the head through the cruder digestive processes. If we want to support what takes place within the human being—thus having an effect on digestion—so that the substances stream up into the head and are therefore able to unfold their effect from there, we must naturally do everything we can to bring this about. Therefore, although we want first of all to introduce the plant substance to the inner part of the body, we must form it in such a way that it works into the head. We can observe such an effect especially when we make use of seeds. Seeds by their very nature are especially suitable to influence the cruder digestive processes. And by acting directly on the cruder digestive processes, they act on the head in calling forth reactions. Nevertheless, it is very difficult to promote the effect from the digestion to the head. Therefore it will be useful to make a very concentrated decoction of the seeds, if this agrees with the patient. We can study this especially well if we consider the effects of decoctions of caraway seeds. These contain ethereal oils, which act essentially upon the ego; wax, which has a very strong physical effect; and also resins, which also unfold strong effects in the physical. The powerful effect is also shown by the aromatic smell. In addition, this decoction contains levulose.

If we consider all this in connection with what we have studied in the last few days, we will see that it strengthens the activity of the ego to an extraordinary degree. It affects the nerve-sense activity concealed in the digestive organs. It works especially on this weak nerve-sense activity in the digestive organs—this activity extends throughout the digestive organs in a very faintly formed metamorphosis. The effect of such a decoction on the lower human being resembles what one might call a subconscious metamorphosis of our outer sense perception. We are stimulated to perceive with the digestive system what is developing as process there. Hence this remedy is very valuable when administered through an enema. When given by enema, it calls forth a process that must act on the nerve-sense activity. This is an outer administration of the finer forces of the caraway seeds, and in this way a kind of subconscious perception is evoked in the digestive organs. The lethargic tissue fluid is especially stimulated by this means. By thus introducing a process strengthening the nerve-sense activity, perception is driven much further into the human being. The patient becomes a perceiver in his digestive organs, and this works against the opposite pole that we find when an inner activity begins that can also be perceived—consisting, indeed, of inner perception—when our organism begins to express itself in eruption-like states. By our strong perception of our organism when it develops such an organic activity, so that we are actually perceiving ourselves, we dampen down such activity and therefore have a curative effect on it. Such an activity represents a perception from within outward, a nerve-sense activity similar to, though a metamorphosis of, outer perception. Thus we can work beneficially with this remedy in cases of stomach cramps, colicky conditions, and flatulence.

Yet another process is extremely interesting to observe. Picture vividly to yourselves the subconscious process developed in such a case. This subconscious activity is extraordinarily similar to the activity of outer sense perception, but it takes place within. Consider that the outer activity of perception and the reflex activity are connected in a certain way. Perceptions that appear subconsciously can call forth defensive movements immediately. Study this cooperation of perceptive activity and the reflex reaction against it, and carry this over to the inner activity of the tissue fluid. You carry out this outer perceptive activity in floating in the air, in a sense. Sketching this schematically, let this be the air in which we carry ourselves (see drawing, bright). It is permeated with light, etc. Outer perception (red) unfolds in this direction; the inner reaction (blue) unfolds in this direction. In every sense organ there is a cooperation between external action and inner reaction. If you want an outer, abstract picture of this process, you should not choose the one chosen by the modern materialistic view, namely, that of a centrifugal and a centripetal nerve activity. Such a view is no more intelligent than saying: when a rubber ball is pressed it recovers its former shape by means of another force, i.e., by the counterpart of the pressure itself. It is no more intelligent to speak of motor-nerves than to explain the elasticity of a rubber ball by ascribing to it some center within that pushes out what has been pushed in. What happens in both cases is really no more than the restitution of the original form; it is the reaction that sets in, requiring no special nerves, because the whole phenomenon—action and reaction—is embedded in the astrality and ego nature.

Now picture this whole process working by way of the etheric activity in the tissue fluid (see drawing, yellow). Of course, a sense process does not take place in the tissue fluid under normal conditions, but it can be evoked in the way I have just indicated. A kind of contracting tendency arises, a tendency to work in toward the organism, and I will sketch that in this way, just as I indicate here the action of perception. But this (see drawing, red) is a process that in a sense assaults the outwardly directed forces in the tissue fluid (violet). Here is the action, and this is the reaction. Thus one is inserting a sense process, a metamorphosis of the sense process, into the tissue fluid. It is extraordinarily interesting to observe this insertion of a metamorphosis of the outer sense process into the tissue fluid. Now we must search for something similar that takes place in normal life, that is, some condition in which a kind of metamorphosis of these sense processes within the human being, a densified sense process, arises in the tissue fluid. This takes place when a woman secretes milk. Here, in fact, we have a densified metamorphosis of the outer sense process transferred inward. Now, if this milk secretion is deficient when it is supposed to be there, we have every cause to intensify this densified internal sense process in the tissue fluid. We can evoke this process with a decoction of caraway seeds, thus supporting the secretion of milk.

I have presented these things as examples of the way the whole working and weaving of the human organism and its connection with the outer world can be considered. Consider precisely what I have said: that a decoction of caraway seeds contains resin and wax, i.e., something whose consistency evokes very strong physical effects. Resin and wax are thereby very similar to what makes an impression on me from outside, only inwardly densified. This seed also contains etheric oils and levulose. This is something that stimulates the reaction of the ego. Taking all this together, you have everything contained in the sense process: action from outside, and the reaction extending to the ego from within. If you now metamorphose this sense process by not creating a sense impression but transferring this interaction inward into the tissue fluid's system of forces, you then have what evokes an inner sense process in you. The secretion of milk is such a process. You will see how the entire organization can be understood in this way.

These are the matters you must study if you wish to consider the effects of the substances of the outer world within the body. For example, if you study the effect of metal-mineral remedies, you will readily understand what you have learned from the influence of the plant element, but you will also realize something else: that the mineral element has undergone a change in passing into the plant process and continuing its activity there. In this mineralizing and “vegetabilizing” process, a transformation of the mineral forces has taken place. Part of the healing process thus depends on the transformation of the mineral forces. Imagine we were to build a sanatorium in the country. Then we could surround it with fields and manure these fields with various mineral substances, creating a soil whose content is known to us. We can sow there various plants from which we will use the root, leaf, fruit, and so on. Thus we will have control of the process by which the plant transforms the mineral into a remedy. We can strengthen this process by growing the plants we have just discussed and treating them in the way I just mentioned. We want to do this at our Research Institute in Stuttgart, but this must still be arranged. One can go still further, however. One can take what has been obtained from the plant itself as a remedy and can use it as a kind of manure, thereby intensifying its force. In this way ordinary triturated preparations will be made much more effective, for nature herself, and the forces active in nature, are allowed to do some of the work of preparation.

Of course we have to be clear about the following: for example, how should a mineral-metallic remedy act in order to have an effect? Salts, which are really mineral remedies, produce effects more toward the inside of the human being. The most peripheral activities, however, are influenced by just those mineral-metallic substances that are most firm. Here we have a direction for research, but always on the basis of spiritual scientific knowledge, for otherwise our thoughts will split up and run in every possible wrong direction. The thoughts of spiritual science guide our thinking in the right direction. When we look at a metal, we know it can only be weakly taken hold of by the inner human organism. There the activity of the ego must be highly stimulated, for it is the ego that, in a sense, undermines and penetrates into the interior of the substance, shaping this for its own purposes and summoning it to ego activity in the organism. The ego can be strengthened in this activity by the astral body. Thus when we make use of metals or minerals, we must always see whether we are stimulating the ego activity or the astral activity that then works back on the ego, or whether we are stimulating the interaction between the astral and ego activity.

Such stimulation can be achieved, for example, in the following way: We prepare a metallic ointment and apply it, let us say, to a skin eruption; we thereby stimulate the peripheral ego activity. This ego activity is similarly stimulated by a reaction within the human being. This arises within the human being first in an intensified nerve-sense activity in some organ. This leads from there to an intensified breathing activity, passing over to the astral. The effect is that those forces within the body then work against the skin eruption. We appeal to the whole body to work against the skin eruption.

On this basis the various metallic and mineral substances can be studied in a similar way. In lead, for instance, you have a substance that acts with extraordinary strength on nerve-sense activity, and then, dependent on this, on the inner breathing activity, including the inner breathing activity that takes place in the outer, peripheral organs, for example. If we use lead, either as an ointment or internally, we can achieve a good deal when it is necessary to evoke what I have just described. When we give it internally, however, we must realize that we are evoking the reaction of the upper human being by means of the activity stimulated in the digestive organs. If we apply carefully prepared lead ointment to the upper human being, we act directly on this upper system. In patients suffering from weaknesses in the head region—i.e., in which the upper human being develops neither a proper nerve-sense activity nor a proper breathing activity—we will be able to achieve a great deal with such lead cures, provided we do not go too far and cause lead-poisoning.

We must take into account something else with everything we may gather from the presentations in the last few days and in the previous course. It is most important to be aware of a great contrast here. Those substances tending more toward silver have a polar relationship to those tending more toward lead. In regard to these matters our classifications of minerals are most deficient. These defects are fundamental, for a reasonable classification of minerals would have to take into account these family relationships of the metals. We should see lead and its compounds at one pole, and at the other pole silver, while gold, for example, would be in the middle, and the other metals arrayed appropriately. I call silver and lead opposites because silver acts directly on the metabolic- limb system, especially on its periphery, on the part of the metabolic-limb organism that lies nearer the surface. Lead acts, likewise, on the part of the head organism lying closer to the surface. Thus silver stimulates the nerve-sense activity in the metabolic-limb system and from there calls forth the activity that permeates the whole body and that stimulates the breathing in everything that yesterday I called a metamorphosis of the central heart organ.

On the other hand, what proceeds from lead works on the nerve-sense activity of the head and on the breathing activity stimulated from there. Hence it stimulates the head formation, lung formation, and liver formation, that is, the organs belonging to the other path of metamorphosis. These organs in a sense surround the other organization of the human being, just as the lungs surround the heart, showing us the archetypal form of that which, as the “circulatory human being,” is in a certain respect the whole human being. We have the lungs surrounding the heart, the lungs embracing, as it were, the circulatory being with the respiratory being. Likewise, when we study the human being in regard to his brain formation, lung formation, and liver formation, that is, the whole upper posterior human being, we have a more all-encompassing breathing embracing all the blood vessels together with the heart. The digestive organization and also the sexual organization are surrounded in this way by the upper posterior human being. The human organization is such that the upper posterior human being surrounds the lower anterior human being. We must thoroughly understand the mutual relationships and differentiations of the upper posterior human being and the lower anterior human being, which comes to expression primarily in the interrelationship of heart and lungs; we must study this properly, the rhythmic interplay involved in this, the nerve-sense activity lying above and to the back, and the opposite pole in the metabolic-limb processes lying below and to the front. We must study the other manifestations of the upper and lower human being, and only then will we have the whole human being before us. Only in this way can we then master his other processes as well.

From this starting point, we will move on tomorrow to a special discussion of our individual remedies. In doing so, we will naturally be led to deal with some of the questions that have been posed here.

Today's lecture will be an assortment of various topics I would like to add to what I have already said to you, including reference to our remedies. I would like to begin by saying that processes related to the mineral element that affect the human being can be interpreted similarly to the way done yesterday regarding the plant world. However, the insights we must gain here are more complicated, because as soon as we move on to the mineral world we are no longer dealing with definite, self-contained entities encountering each other, as was the case with plants and the human being; instead we are dealing with a realm in which one object passes directly into the other, so that it is difficult to make distinctions.

In the preparation of remedies—to this you must pay particular attention in our remedies—it is not merely a question of using some substance or other; the process in which the substance lives must be captured in another process. Thus when the effect of some remedy is known to you, it is often a matter of taking the effect you evoke on one side and damming it in from the other. You can see this clearly, for example, with the remedy we prepare from lead and treat in a certain way with honey (you will find this process described in detail elsewhere). You can see how the effect of lead must be held in check in one direction by the effect of the honey. Lead exerts a very strong influence on the formative process proceeding from the ego in the human being. We have spoken of the fact that in the head formation of the human being—or, said better, in the head formation proceeding from the human being—there lies a physical influence, but also an etheric imprint, an astral imprint, and an ego imprint. We said that the ego essentially imprints itself into the system of movement. The effect of lead works especially strongly on this imprint of the ego and takes place in conjunction with the astral imprint.

In the effect of lead we have a force of nature that is extraordinarily well-hidden, and for occult observation it is of exceptionally deep significance to experience this effect of lead. The effects of lead are extraordinarily important for the human being before he prepares to descend into physical life. This is when the effects of lead must be taken into account. Indeed, lead acts not only in the ways we know, but it has effects that are the polar opposite as well.

These polar effects radiate in from the cosmos, whereas those known to us radiate into the cosmos from the earth. This could be represented schematically like this. If this is the surface of the earth, the lead activities known to us radiate outward from the earth (see figure 1, arrows); the polar opposite effects stream in from all sides. They have no center from which they radiate, for they are not central forces but forces operating from the periphery (red). These peripheral forces are especially concerned with the formation of the soul-spiritual in the human being, and their domain must essentially be left when the human being prepares to descend into the earthly sphere. Hence in the earthly sphere lead is induced to unfold its opposite forces, and these are the poisonous ones. Everything connected spatially with the soul-spiritual in the human being, that is everything that can be spoken about in relation to space, is poison in the human organism.

This is a universal mystery to which one cannot pay too much attention. The meaning of the concept of poisoning must be sought here. We have to do with a strong stimulation, a powerful excitation of these ego-imprinting forces in human nature. Everything that arises in lead poisoning tends to destroy the form of the human being in so far as he is an ego. It dehumanizes him. In fact, all the symptoms of lead poisoning terminate in an individual gradually passing into nothingness corporeally. These symptoms include failure of the voice, stupor, and syncope, and attest to the fundamental destruction of the inborn formative force in the human being. Of course a person dies before this point is reached. The human formation is being destroyed from the upper human being, which is the polar opposite of the lower human being. What in greater quantities acts destructively in the upper human being acts in small quantities—in dilutions—constructively in the lower human being.

At this point I would like to interject something. I believe the never-ending conflict between homeopathy and allopathy will not be set right until one is able to enter into a study of man's constitution as given by spiritual science. On the one hand, the rich treasure of experience does not—or at least, should not—allow us to doubt the principle of homeopathy; on the other hand, people who are not in the habit of judging purely by experience but are swayed by all sorts of prejudices and opinions about the human organism cannot easily understand that what can make a person ill in larger doses in smaller doses makes him well. The homeopath is always more of a phenomenalist than the allopathic physician, who is always swayed in his therapeutic rationale by all sorts of prejudices. The facts are not fully revealed by this simpler statement, however. They are discovered only when we say: what makes a person ill when working in large quantities in the lower system will make him well when working in small quantities if its effect can proceed from the upper system and vice versa. This restatement of the homeopathic rule is the means to set right the conflict between homeopathy and allopathy.

Let us return now to the attempt of preparing a remedy from lead and honey. You can see how lead, greatly diluted and acting from below up, works against the destructive force acting on the human form. This is part of lead's effect. However, if one tries to build up this ego-shaping force, one transfers the activity of the ego into the physical organism and, while making the patient healthy bodily, one renders him psychically weak regarding everything that should work from below upward, that should work even organically. This weakening can go so far that one may, on the one hand, restore the individual to his human form, as it were, having been led by certain processes of disease to use the effect of lead because the formative processes are lacking. On the other hand, one may easily undermine the forces proceeding from the ego and astral body—especially those from the ego—when one causes the individual to develop his formative forces again. You could say that one brings about a cure for what the individual has not acquired, or has acquired only incompletely on entering life, but one weakens him regarding what he ought to do organically for himself during life. The effect of the honey when added to the remedy, however, opposes this weakening, that is, it strengthens the forces radiating from the ego. You see, in arriving at such a remedy, it is essentially a question of gaining insight into what is really taking place in the human being.

If we wish to understand the effects of the mineral element in the human being, however, we must look at the general effect of the mineral in the earth. It is necessary first to become acquainted with the significance of salts in the evolution of the earth. The significance of the salts in earthly evolution is that the earth actually produces them. In salt processes we find what the earth brings into being. In developing salts, the earth builds itself up. And when we turn from the salts to the acids—looking, for example, at the acid's element present in the watery earth regions, we have the earthly process corresponding to, though the polar opposite of, the inner digestive process in the human being, that is, the digestive process beyond the stomach.

We need to study all these processes taking place in earthly development, inasmuch as they represent a relation between acids and salts. When we consider the process that develops from bases through acids to salts, which can be observed outwardly today in chemistry, we see that, regarded in this way, the process leading from base to acid to salt coincides with the earth-forming process.

This process is essentially a negative electrical process. To put it more exactly: this process, expressed in its external, spatial aspect—i.e., as a process working its way out of the spiritual into the physical—can be represented schematically as follows. We have here an effect proceeding from the bases through the acids to the salts; it is indicated only in its direction here (see figure 2, red arrows), but it is actually a process of deposition expressed schematically. Now, when we express this process in reverse, passing from the salts through acids to bases, we must always remove these lines of deposition. They would act in a compressing way, and the opposite radiations appear, which radiate out (see figure 2 on right, arrows). Then we have to do with a positive electrical process. If you look at this sketch, I believe you will hardly doubt that it has been drawn by nature herself. Just look once at the anodes and cathodes and you will find this picture sketched by nature herself.

Now, if we approach the metallic process, that is, if we approach the metals themselves, we find in the metals that element by which the earth “unbecomes” (“ent-wird”) most, if I may use this expression, though it has long disappeared from the German language, despite the fact that it corresponds to reality: werden—entwerden—to become—to unbecome. With metals we find the tendency for the earth to disintegrate, to shatter in pieces, rather than the tendency to preserve or consolidate themselves in the earthly kingdom. They actually represent the “unbecoming” or passing away of the earth, and as a result they develop hidden radiating events, concealed even to external observation. You have this radiating effect everywhere. It is very important to observe this wherever we approach the metallic element with our interpretations of nature in an attempt to derive remedies.

It is especially interesting to study individual metals from this viewpoint. Such a study leads us to the viewpoint represented outwardly by this table of the mineral remedies we consider valuable. To arrive at these things it is necessary to gather everything yielded by such a correct interpretation of observations. They will be reliable, because we have prepared only those remedies that have their basis in a comprehensive interpretation of observations. Here we can elaborate on this interpretation, for I am really not concerned with simply repeating this list to you. Any additions that have to be made can be given in a written exposition. At some point this will have to be done. I am less concerned with repeating this list than with guiding your thoughts in the direction that could lead to such a list in the first place.

Let us now study the metals—I would prefer to say: the metallic nature—from this viewpoint. There we find what I have just described as a radiation, and it is present in the most varied forms. It can exist in the emanating form of radiation, destroying the earthly and passing into cosmic space. This is especially the case with the lead-activity. Through this lead-activity the human being has implanted into his organism those forces that would like to disperse him into the world. This dispersing into the world is an aspect of lead-activity, so that we can best regard this effect as a radiating one. Such radiating effects appear in a different way in other metals, for example, magnesium. This can be seen clearly and is the basis for the role magnesium plays in the teeth. Through the human organism this must be brought to the point of a metallic activity. This actually happens, but the radiation must then be able to metamorphose itself again. And when this radiation has metamorphosed, it becomes what I would like to call simply “direction.” The radiation is now only “direction,” what happens, however, is an oscillation, a pendular movement to and from this direction.

We must study such effects in the healthy and sick person. In the healthy person, these radiating effects are present in the radiations of the sense organs, as remnants, you could say, of the life before birth, of prenatal existence. These are always present. What radiates from the sense organs consists basically of after-effects of lead, in which lead itself is no longer present. These radiations occur throughout the entire organism wherever there is sense activity. Nerve activity, that is, the functional activity going on in the nerves, has its basis essentially on a weakening of the sense activity in this direction. This activity is therefore based on a weaker radiation. You can see from this why I said in my book, Riddles of the Soul (Von Seelenrätseln), that it is difficult to describe the actual nerve-sense activity, because I would first have had to introduce everything I have now presented to you.

In this oscillatory process, this pendular movement, in which the radiation is only considered in regard to its direction, we have to do with what functionally underlies all breathing in the human organism, in fact all rhythmic activity. Rhythmic activity is based on setting up such pendular movements, on setting up a movement more consolidated in itself than the movement of radiations. Among the metals or metallic nature, tin, for example, has such a movement. The beneficial effect of tin in fairly high potencies on everything that bears upon the rhythmic system is based on this fact.

This radiating, pendular movement can be modified further, however, and this third modification is of great significance. This third modification maintains its direction and also its pendular motion only latently. On the other hand, it consists of spheres continually forming and dissolving in the direction of the radiation. What has an effect on the metabolism in the human being depends on these forces, and among metals it is iron that develops especially these forces. Hence the iron in the blood works against the effect of metabolism as a third metamorphosis of the radiating activity.

When we are dealing with the first metamorphosis, the effect is especially on everything that organically concerns the ego; when dealing with the second metamorphosis, the effect is organically on everything that concerns the astral body; and with regard to the third metamorphosis, the effect is organically on everything related to the etheric body (see figure 3).

Now let us go further. What develops there as the continuous “radiation of spheres”—if I may call it so—must be continually received because it acts, in a sense, from the upper human being toward the lower. It only goes as far as the etheric. Now it must also be received by the physical by means of a force acting polarically, for something that envelops the spheres from outside must come to meet such a sphere-formation. The sphere must be taken hold of and enveloped (see figure 4).

It can be that the sphere-formation and this enveloping action are approximately balanced. This is naturally the case in a normal person, where everything that works downward from the upper human being is counterbalanced by the effect of the lower human being on the upper. This adjustment takes place especially in the damming-up activity of the heart. When this balance is disturbed, however, the metal that can bring equilibrium is gold, au rum. This restores the balance between this enveloping process and what lies in the middle. One will have to use gold when disturbances of the circulation and breathing occur that do not appear as results of something else; that is, when the causes are not to be found in the rest of the organism, gold will be applied. If, on the other hand, you notice that the causes proceed from a region other than the boundary between the lower and upper human being, you will be led to say, “There are not enough of these enveloping material processes coming from the individual to meet the more etheric-spiritual processes taking place here.” And if the activity you find here lies more toward the inside, in the digestive processes beyond the intestinal wall, you will assist this enveloping process by applying copper.

This leads us to the ways of using copper, which is included among our remedies. It is generally used in connection with a form of malnutrition manifesting outwardly in disturbances of the circulation that are consequences of the malnutrition. If we are dealing with circulatory disturbances that cannot be regarded as results of malnutrition, then we give gold; if circulatory disturbances are connected with malnutrition, we use copper.

Now, there must be counterprocesses also for the other processes of radiation, material counterprocesses to the etheric-spiritual processes. Consider the process that we must now regard as an inner process, which brings about this pendular movement, this oscillation. When it becomes abnormal, when it grows too strong, it can be observed in everything constituting the digestion, in working through the absorbed food by the intestines, and, coming more to the outside, all that is situated on this side. This therefore includes what occurs in sexuality, for example. The sexual processes are radiations from the human being that run their course in this way (see figure 3) like the staff of Mercury. This played a part in establishing the ancient so-called symbols. If what is active here is not to degenerate, it must be opposed by material, formative forces holding it in check and preventing this degeneration. These formative forces are essentially to be found in mercury. We are here pointing to a realm in which it is extremely important to bring together what I said in the last course with what a more inner study now teaches us. If you bring these two things together you will have the whole process before you. This is now something that plays entirely into the astral, arising through such pendular, radiating movements and through the corresponding counter-images. It now passes over entirely into the astral (see figure 3).

We may also be concerned with the actual radiation process that is present in the human organism in the most manifold ways. On the one hand, we find this process in everything that radiates out through the skin, in everything that has this directional radiation in it. We find this process in everything that causes urination, in everything that has an evacuating action in the human being. Just as in the gastrula stage of embryonic development the outside is drawn inward, so in this radiation we have to do with something that acts toward the outside through the skin but that also takes on the opposite direction and works in the processes causing urination and bowel evacuation. Usually we find the polar process expressing itself in an opposite direction, but here we have something that is, in a sense, reversed and yet similar. You see, one must not try to treat things in the world schematically. Errors always arise when we start from theories. It is impossible to start from a theory and not succumb to error. Thus if someone says to himself, “Polarity is at work in the world,” and then proceeds to construct a scheme or formula for polarity, saying that polarity must act in this or that way, he will be able to coordinate certain series of facts but he will have to abandon his formula in the face of other phenomena, where things are different. If only we could gain insight into this terrible tyranny exerted by theorizing in science!

Of course, one must be willing to make theories, for otherwise it would be impossible to coordinate any realm of phenomena. At the same time, however, one must be willing to drop one's theory in the right place and penetrate further to the point where this theory has no more value. Natural science must also pay heed to this. If one wishes to work on the theory of evolution in an outer sense, one must keep to the outer theory, modifying it where necessary. If one wishes to understand the human being from within, one must keep to what anthroposophy has to offer. But neither an anthroposophical nor an anthropological theory can be applied in any other way than by leaving it behind at the right point and passing into the other domain. With what we call anthroposophy, of course, we enter the soul-spiritual domain and return again to outer, sense-perceptible phenomena. You can observe how, in my early writings, I followed this path as a matter of course, and how in my more recent writings I am now trying to embrace the other domain as well. Only fools find devious contradictions in this and so construct their idiotic attacks. Then German journals, run by people who are incapable of judgment, publish idiotic attacks as a serious discussion on anthroposophy.

The point is that we must take into account this process that can be described as a radiation, as I have just done. Then we have to work against this, and we can do so by appealing to the opposite radiation, one active in silver, for example. In this connection we must realize that silver must be applied as an ointment if it is to have an effect on the kind of radiation that expresses itself through the skin; however, it must be injected in some form if it is to deal with the other activity that follows the direction of evacuation in some way. Here you have what I might call a “guideline” for the particular way in which to handle such matters. Basically, just as much depends on the way such things are handled as on the quality of the remedy.

This study has led us to the remedies, and I would like to conclude it with some comments in reply to questions that have been posed. If I have not been able to complete our program this time, I must ask you to excuse this due to the shortness of time. If you pay attention to my method of answering questions, however, I believe you will see from it that I have tried to shape the lectures of the last few days so as to lead to the answers to these questions. To demonstrate this, I will select a characteristic question that someone has posed. It was asked about the widespread popular notion that women during menstruation have a kind of withering effect on flowers nearby, particularly if they touch them. This notion has its basis in reality, though it has not been observed often enough and is therefore frequently overlooked. All you need to do is to take the view of the human being that we have developed here, and you will find the inner cause of this phenomenon. Just consider that what works in the flower and the formation of the blossom strives upward from the earth; in the human being, what corresponds to this blossoming force works from above downward. This is certainly a cosmological-organic polarity. You need only picture that this normal process striving upward in the blossoms of plants is the opposite of the human process working from above downward (see figure 5). There must be a balance, and this is present in the normal human being.

Now picture the forces from above downward intensified, which is what manifests during menstruation. Then you have an intensification of forces in the human being that work against the blossoming forces of plants. So you see how an understanding of the connection of these facts enables you, if you proceed in this way, to understand this remarkable relationship that finds expression in popular views surviving from ancient, instinctive perceptions.

Here is another question: “What can one do for a type of asthma that starts with cramp state and includes among its symptoms a surplus of blood below and a deficiency of blood above?” How do we treat this form of asthma? What is going on in such a case? In such a case, the nerve-sense process has slipped down into the breathing process. This is nothing other than an excessive activity within the breathing process, and clearly this excessive activity is due to the slipping down of the nerve-sense process. You must work against this polarically; you must approach from the other side. You must oppose what has entered from outer nature with forces that have the opposite direction. You call forth such forces when you introduce the acid process through the skin, that is, by giving carbonic acid baths or other acidic baths. These will be especially beneficial in asthmatic diseases of this type. If you keep in mind the other things I have spoken about, you will be led to use many other remedies as well.

Now, a question has been asked about milk injection in cases of excessive mucous discharge. This procedure has indeed caused tremendous astonishment and satisfaction in clinics. From what I have presented in these lectures about milk secretion you will readily see that in a large number of cases this treatment is connected with what I said. You need only recall what we said about the secretion of milk: that it is also a sense-process, but one that has slipped down deeper. I have already described the abnormalities that arise there. Now, directive forces remain, of course, in the secreted product. This is a process in which what has taken place within the organism continues. If you now inject a patient with milk, you can obviously work against a process that depends on fairly similar things. This is a case in which empirical chance has in fact worked in an extraordinarily ingenious way, for this treatment has only been discovered by chance, that is, by experimenting. It is generally of the greatest importance to look into the metamorphosis of a process. If a person cannot gain insight into how processes are metamorphosed, he will be unable to judge the simplest things correctly.

A question has surfaced about the causes of colds, of all those things designated by the somewhat diffuse concept of a “cold.” Here also a sense activity is displaced, pushed down into the breathing activity, but now in a different way from before. The secretions that arise are only reactions to this. This is something that takes place in the organism more toward the surface, something that continually takes place within the organism through the interaction of the nerve-sense activity and the metabolic activity. This is going on inside continually. You should not be surprised that these things are treated by the simplest methods, with poultices and the like, in which a kind of nerve-sense activity is inserted where otherwise it is not present. All poultices and so on push a nerve-sense activity into the organism, an activity that is half-conscious and otherwise would not be there.

I have also been asked how muscle forces are related to bone forces. Their relationship is such that the effects that have come to rest or are dying in bone forces are in full movement in muscle forces. Bones are simply transformed muscles, not in the genetic sense, but from the point of view of the idea. For this reason it is really absurd to look for a genetic connection between bones and muscles, or even between cartilage and bone. Many people have correctly drawn attention to the difficulty of finding a genetic connection here. Bunge, for instance, has pointed to this difficulty in finding a genetic connection between cartilage and bone, but he has not, of course, pointed to the source of this difficulty. It is due to the fact that there is a metamorphosis here. Just picture, however, the time when the whole muscle formation has not yet passed into the organic-visible sphere (see figure 6, red). This is also the case with cartilage formation, only much less so. Picture the time when the muscle and bone formation are still undifferentiated (see figure 6, light). When differentiation proceeds into this state of undifferentiation, these processes are subject at the same time to polarity, and it is naturally extraordinarily difficult to detect this metamorphosis. You can detect an outer, genetic metamorphosis only if, in the differentiation of one tissue from another, polarity does not have an essential effect during the transformation, but the original direction is maintained. When polarity immediately exerts influence on differentiation, quite another structure will naturally result, and this will no longer resemble the first.

We will address some of the other questions in the next lecture. There is however a question which I beg you to recognize as typical for questions which lead to a realm where confusion sets in strongly and where one ought to avoid drawing analogies. The question is whether one could construct something like a spectrum of taste, going from sweet through bitter, sour, chalky, to salty, and then also perhaps a spectrum of smell. There is so little objectivity regarding taste and smell, in fact, that it is especially useless to try to find analogies. Such things are of minor significance in practical application. On leaving the domain of the eye and ear and passing into the domain of taste and smell, we come into a totally different realm. In visual perceptions one has to do with revelations entirely from the etheric world, whereas in the processes of smell and taste one has to do with something involved very powerfully in material processes, in effects of substances, in metabolic processes. Thus in passing over to these sense activities, one can keep to the more robust processes that come to expression in metabolism.

Another question has been posed that deals with a significant principle: “Can a human being, without taking anything, produce out of himself bromine, morphine, iodine, quinine, arsenic, and other remedies?” This is a question that leads to very deep foundations of man's whole organization. One cannot produce the substances, but one can produce the processes. It can be said emphatically that one is, of course, quite unable to produce the substance ‘lead’ in oneself. However it is quite possible to produce the lead process in oneself from out of the etheric and then to let it radiate into the physical body. Here it may be asked whether it is not possible then to dilute a substance homeopathically to such a degree that by this process I try to work into the etheric body, calling forth this process of ‘self-metallization,’ of ‘self-radiation,’ that corresponds to a process of metallic radiation? In a certain sense this is absolutely possible, but it is a matter of advancing to the process of radiation that proceeds from the metallic element.

If you remain stuck in the allopathic way of thinking, you cannot approach these things, of course. You must think of them as follows: The radiating forces of magnesium are present in the process of tooth formation. These are forces that have a significance for the whole human organism, for the teeth are pushed out of the whole human being. You may use magnesium salt, any magnesium salt—magnesium sulphate, let us say—applying it in such a way that you put aside all allopathic approaches and prepare an especially strong dilution. Here we are led to the necessity of using quite high dilutions. You now have a twofold effect: you have first the effect of magnesium that basically stops where the teeth are. In the normal person the magnesium forces do not extend beyond this region. You must intensify them so that they extend their effect further, irradiating the whole human being. One can achieve this especially well by using the salt, magnesium sulphate, for this furthers the magnesium radiation even into the head forces. You allow it to radiate back from there. In fact, this process that proceeds from the etheric—remaining in the etheric by this homeopathizing process—is called forth where one has only the forces but not the substance, where one has proceeded from a totally different substance. You know, of course, that magnesium sulfate has been used empirically here, but one will only be able to use it rationally if this connection is borne in mind. It will then be noticed that one can depend on the sulfate only halfway; one must also depend on the magnesium for the other half, so that anyone who believes another sulfate would do as well will be making a mistake. This is the sort of thing that results if one proceeds from considerations that are supported only by the methods of the outer sense world and a combining intellect.

I would now like to point out briefly that all these matters that have been presented to you must be studied in the following way: In order to get behind the effects that must be observed, one must first select single features; then, however, one must see them again as a whole. With these lectures in particular, I am requiring you to exert yourselves to see things in their interrelationships. And now I would like to suggest how you might do this. I have been asked, for example, about exophthmalic goiter, Graves' disease. You may turn to what I explained in the first lecture on curative eurythmy, where I pointed out that the thyroid gland is a brain that has not attained completion. If you recall this and notice how the forces that act abnormally in Graves' disease tend toward the thyroid gland and, in doing so, produce all the other symptoms associated with Graves' disease, you will find how to work against it by measures that oppose this overly strong tendency of the human being to become a “head.” Here we are led to what is to occupy the next lecture. We are led to see that such conditions can really be opposed beneficially by significant movements, especially by significant movements associated with consonants. And you will achieve results in the initial stage of Graves' disease if you thoroughly apply what we have just spoken about in the curative eurythmy lecture. You see, in connecting all these things you must also look in that direction. We will not bring these studies to a close with these lectures but will continue with them another time. There is still one lecture remaining, however.

What I have to say to you today about eurythmy will require the aid of the findings of physiology and the like. How this should happen will no doubt become clear to you as a matter of fact in the course of your work. Precisely when investigating a bodily and spiritual process such as the one which occurs in doing eurythmy, we cannot do otherwise than point to deeper physical and spiritual connections.

To begin with, we will look at that extra-human cosmic process usually considered only with respect to its external details and not explored with respect to what is inwardly active. Just consider that “earth formation” means that a formative tendency is working in from the collective planetary sphere and that in addition a formative impulse into the earth emanates from what lies even beyond the planetary sphere, through continually in-streaming cosmic forces which manifest themselves in individual force entities on the earth.

We can come to understand these cosmic forces (this can also include everything which I previously said about radiations) by considering them as working towards the center and forming from outside what is on the earth and in the earth. It is, for example, a fact that the metals of the earth, in their entirety, are not primarily formed by forces inside the earth but are placed into the earth from out of the cosmos. These forces, which work through the ether (from the planetary sphere, not from the planets, for then they would be working centrally again—the planets are there to modify them) we can call formative forces, the formative forces working from outside. They encounter forces which in man and in the earth receive the formative forces, consolidate them and gather them around a center so that the earth can come into being. Thus we can call these forces the consolidating forces (see diagram).

They are present in man as forces which plastically shape the organs, whereas the other forces, the formative forces, push the organs, as it were, from the spiritual-etheric world into the physical world.

This is a process which, if I could say it this way, is almost palpable in the contrast between the pushing forces of magnesium and the forces of fluorine which round off. It is a process which can be found everywhere; in the teeth it occurs from below upwards, rounding itself above, and it also occurs from front to back and from back to front, and from above to below, rounding itself below. Again you can get an almost palpable comprehension of this process if you imagine that with the tendency to push something spherical towards the back, from outside towards the inside, something is formed there, and this is opposed by a sphere-forming process from below to above (see figure 2, red). Between these processes there is mediation by the secretory processes, including also the assimilation of what is secreted by other processes; in short, everything one can call secretory processes in the widest sense because, after all, assimilation depends on the reabsorption of something which is secreted towards the inside. Thus what is active in between can best be called secretory processes.

Again you can have a palpable comprehension of such a secretory process if you think that, on the one hand, something is present here which wants to continuously excrete carbon (see figure 3, orange) and that there is something else which assimilates it again in the formation of carbonic acid (white) through breathing from the front. Then such a secretory process continues behind it.

If you go still further down into the metabolic-limb process, you have a real consolidation process. However, this consolidation process is also present in the other direction. You can see it everywhere, and you can have a palpable experience, as it were, if you look at the eye. As embryology shows us, it is formed from outside towards the inside, and is consolidated from within; the formation is internalized. The development of the eye depends on this (see figure 4, orange). Then as we go on to the soul and spirit in man, and therefore to the organs of the soul and spirit, to the sense organs, we see this consolidation process spiritualizing itself—really ensouling and spiritualizing itself in perception. This, in a way, is the descending process which leads to the formation of organs (see figure 1). We find the perceptual process, or objective perception, at the lower end.

If this develops further, then perception goes back towards what is consolidating; if what is consolidating becomes conscious it becomes Imagination. If Imagination develops further and becomes conscious through the secretory process, it becomes Inspiration. And if Inspiration develops further towards the formative process and consciously encounters the formative process and thus understands formations, then it becomes Intuition. One can thus develop these stages of soul life from objective perception to Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition.

This process, developed in the soul, is based on the process of becoming, but as you can see (in figure 1), it is the reversal of the process of becoming. One goes towards what has become, and ascends into becoming again in the reverse direction. Forming goes in a descending direction. One climbs up in the reverse direction and goes towards becoming. So, what one develops as perception and cognitional forces in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition always has a counter-effect in the creative forces which express themselves in the formative forces, the secretory and consolidation processes.

From this you will see that something is active in the human organism in a reverse direction in creating and becoming from what one gets into if one ascends in cognition. This will show you that it is true that in Imagination we come to the same forces which assert themselves—without our consciousness—in growth phenomena, in formative growth phenomena. If we ascend to Inspiration, we come to forces which inspire man from without and thoroughly shape him in breathing, and which weave themselves into the plastic-formative forces and elaborate them. And if we ascend to Intuition, we ascend to the active entity (Agens) which enters our plastic forms as substantial beingness from the outer world.

Thus you see that we are taking hold of man as he shapes himself out of the cosmos here, and if we use the findings which we have acquired in anatomy or physiology and illumine them with what is given us here, then we will begin to understand the organs and their functions. So this is an indication for the understanding of organs and their functions.

Those forces which continually work plastically on man, which normally shape him through, live, on the other hand, in the consonantal movements. These, as I said yesterday, call forth the unconscious forces of Imagination, namely a kind of streaming-through of the organism. Here you can see how consonantal eurythmy takes hold of deficient formative-plastic forces in man and leads them over into the correct formation.

One could observe a child and notice that the body form is either deficient or is proliferating too strongly. What does it mean that the form is proliferating too strongly? It means that the form is working centrifugally and making the head big, and because it is getting too big, it does not get around to permeating itself with forces of Imagination in the right way. So these forces need to be supplied; one lets the child do consonantal eurythmy.

There is a question here about “a two-year old boy with a large head who is apparently healthy otherwise, not hydrocephalic.”—In properly used consonantal eurythmy, you have an antidote to overcome this. This is where a thorough observation of deeper morphological aspects points precisely to a treatment with eurythmy.

Then there is “a 12-3/4-year old boy whose longitudinal growth is clearly retarded, with no organic findings, he has worms, is intelligent but easily becomes mentally fatigued.”—This is an extraordinarily interesting complex of symptoms which all point to insufficient unconscious forces of Imagination, and which indicate that the plastic organ forces are rampant because there are not enough inner, or soul-, plastic forces. The plastic forces of the soul are also the ones which destroy parasites; if they are insufficient, it is no wonder that he has worms. So the antidote is to let him do consonants in eurythmy.

These connections show you exactly where you have to intervene with eurythmy. Even when these symptoms occur in a somewhat concealed way, eurythmy can still have an extraordinarily favorable effect if, in addition, one deals with the matter in a material, therapeutic way.

Here is an interesting question which of course I will have to answer only in principle. If complications occur, they would have to be specifically considered, but, even if something else has to be added, what I have to say here is to the point.—“I have a 5-year old child as a patient who lost a lot of blood from a bullet wound; two years ago his joints started to get deformed. He also has signs and symptoms which later lead to chlorosis (iron deficiency anemia) and the like in adults. How could one deal with this therapeutically?”

Here you have joint deformation. This is a working outwards of plastic forces which cannot stay inside anymore, and which radiate outwards so that they leave man instead of working inside him. They are radiated back most effectively precisely through the use of consonantal eurythmy, for with it you summon the objectively effective Imaginations which offset deformities. In the future (the question already quite correctly points to this), people in general will increasingly tend to deformities in manifold ways because they will not be able to form a normal shape with the unconsciously active forces anymore. Man is becoming free, and eventually he will be free even with respect to shaping his own form; but then he will have to be able to do something with this freedom. Therefore, he has to go over to the creation of Imaginations, which always counteract deforming tendencies.

Here we have deficient objective Imagination, but one might also have to deal with deficient objective Inspiration, which manifests itself through (if I might be permitted to express it in this way) a ‘deforming’ of the rhythmic system. This deforming of the rhythmic system expresses itself especially where the objective Inspiration, which goes inwards, does not meet the circulation rhythm in the right way. And here one works in a normalizing way if one uses vowel eurythmy. This vowel eurythmy also works on inner irregularities but now not accompanied by morphological changes, just as consonantal eurythmy works on morphological deformities, or on tendencies to develop morphological deformities.

Earlier I said that it might be necessary to support something like this if it occurs in a particularly radical fashion, as in the deforming of joints which we just discussed. Then it is necessary to therapeutically assist this process of consonantal eurythmy which, through this Imagination, stimulates the inner breathing of the organs which go from outside to inside, and which are situated beyond the intestinal walls: the lungs, kidneys and liver. It is a fact that if one does consonantal eurythmy, then especially the back part of the head, lungs, liver and kidneys begin to sparkle and scintillate, which shows the soul and spirit reaction to what is done outwardly in the moving of consonants. The whole man becomes a shining being in these organs, and the movements made outwardly are always met by shining movements within. Especially with certain consonant movements a whole shining reproduction of the kidneys' secretion processes occurs; one gets a picture of the whole secreting process of the kidneys. This then works over into unconscious Imaginations, and the entire process is the same one I have described as being under the influence of cuprum; it is the same process.

Here is an occasion to draw the physicians' attention to the fact that there are people who have certain forms of illness. Yesterday, these forms of illness were brought towards me again in the form of extraordinarily admired colored drawings, and people asked whether they were particularly occult. Of course they are occult in a certain way, but it is extraordinarily difficult to talk to people about these matters because such wonderful drawings are actually objectively-fixed kidney-luminescence (Nierenleuchten), they are an objectively-fixed urine formation process. If this urinary process becomes a luminescent process in an abnormal way in certain pathologically disposed people—if a certain congestion of urinary secretion occurs (a purely metabolic disease) and if the kidneys then begin to shine, and if a particular introverted clairvoyance sets in—then they begin to draw furiously. This always turns out to be beautiful, at least in an external, formal sense. The applied colors are always beautiful. Of course, people are not satisfied if one tells them: you have really painted something very beautiful there—that is your congested urinary secretion.—I can assure you that obstructed urinary secretion and suppressed sexual desires, which may also bring about irregularities of the metabolism, may well be presented to you by mystically inclined personalities as deeply mystical drawings and paintings, but much that appears in the world in this way needs to be recognized as symptoms of just barely tolerable pathological human conditions.

You see, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is not mysticism in the way many people understand this, because it does not delude itself about matters such as the ones just characterized. Rather, it investigates them and then people are offended. For example, they were already offended when I went so far in public lectures as to indicate (even though the artistic productions were poems and not drawings) that the beautiful poetry of Mechthild von Magdeburg or of St. Theresa are copies, or the inspirational reflexes, of processes which arise through restrained sexuality. Of course, people find it disagreeable if one describes a Mechthild on Magdeburg or a St. Theresa as personalities with a strong sexuality which they suppressed because it became too strong for them, and that their beautiful poetic creations were then the reaction to certain metabolic and circulatory processes arising from such a suppression. Seen from a higher point of view, this phenomenon leads deeply into the secrets of existence, but one must be able to elevate oneself to such a view.

One should have at least an inkling of these peculiar processes which light up as inner processes when one does eurythmy. If what is hidden in a poem is eurythmized, as I showed you yesterday, if a beautiful poem is read and eurythmy is done to it in an appropriate way with consonants or vowels, then this also is accompanied by something else—then an inner, silent speaking joins what is done there externally in the eurythmy movements. And, if the process is not sweltered out in sultry poems, but if the process simply accompanies beautiful poems eurythmically, then what takes place in people is not a representing of something mystical but is a process which definitely makes a person healthy. If one lets the patient do eurythmy by always telling him to pay attention to what he is hearing and to be strongly aware of the sound heard, and of the heard context of the sentence he is eurythmizing, one will then let him arise to the external formative forces, to the objective intuiting forces.

If one wants to work on what are called inborn errors, defects, etc. (which materialism calls heredity, but a large part of this was brought along from the pre-existent life of soul and spirit) then one will do well to work with eurythmy especially at a young age, by repeatedly challenging the person doing eurythmy to make very clear to himself what he is hearing outwardly. In this way one drives away all those tendencies which want to inwardly fix what may possibly want to arise into something like mystical drawings or poems. This focused listening while doing eurythmy is then attached to the outer, beautiful poem. It is a reverse process. A true mystic knows that there is always something questionable about a beautiful object which is a reflection of an abnormality. On the other hand, if what is beautiful in the outer world is inwardly experienced, one cannot say that it presents itself as a particularly great and beautiful figure; on the contrary, it becomes schematic and abstract in the way that a drawing is abstract. But precisely this is a healthy thing, this is what is desired. It is true that this beautiful, historical process would not have come about—but if, for example, Mechthild von Magdeburg had been induced to do eurythmy to some good poems, she would have been protected from her whole mystical destiny. Of course, when one gets to this point, one arrives where good and evil cease to be. One comes to the amoral Nietzsche sphere beyond good and evil, and of course one should not be narrow-minded and say that all Mechthild von Magdeburgs should be destroyed, bones and all. On the other hand, you can be sure that it is well taken care of from the spiritual worlds, that, even though man does not let these things proliferate, the appropriate connections with the super-sensible world nevertheless remain.

Even though the hour is late, I would like to go into a few things which might clarify the following question:—“Could therapeutic eurythmy exercises be supported by rational breathing exercises? It does not have to be Hatha Yoga right away.”—Rational breathing exercises to supplement eurythmy exercises for present human nature, which is developing as it is today, can only be treated in the following way; one will notice that, under the influence of vowel eurythmy, a tendency to change the breathing rhythm occurs by itself. This one will notice. Then one is faced with the difficulty of not forming mental stereotypes or saying anything in general, but of first observing to come to insight about what should be done.

In a single individual case where one wants to help to heal with vowel eurythmy in accordance with other findings one should observe the breathing, the change in breathing, and then draw the patient's attention to it so that he consciously continues this tendency. For, unlike the old orientals, we can no longer take the reverse path and influence the whole man through prescribed breathing. This is something which under all circumstances leads to inner shocks, whether it is prescribed in this or that way, and it should be avoided. We must learn to observe what vowel eurythmy teaches us about its influence on the breathing process. Then we can consciously continue what appears eurythmically in the individual case. From this you will see that the breathing process is continued in a specifically individual way—that is, differently in different people.

So this, my esteemed friends, is about all that could still be answered. There are a few things we cannot get to because of a lack of time. In conclusion, my dear friends, I would briefly like to tell you that you will have to be prepared for the battle which will proceed just as much from your medical colleagues in the world, once they become strongly aware that some of our kind of thinking is asserting itself, and you will certainly need a strong power of conviction to paralyze what will come to meet you. Of course, opposition should never make one stop doing things, but we should also have no illusions about all the antagonistic forces which will be stirred up.

At the end of this course I would again like to say that to make the movement which is now to be inaugurated in the medical field possible, I will everywhere strictly adhere to the principle of not directly intervening in the healing processes of patients and will only advise the physicians themselves, so that you will always be in a position to reject suggestions that I myself have entered into the doctor-patient relationship in perhaps an unjustified manner. I already said this at the end of the last course. One should not remain silent about the fact that this is made extraordinarily difficult from anthroposophical quarters because, of course, people come with all kinds of unreasonable demands in this respect. It is also definitely the case that there is a tendency among anthroposophists not to get beyond their egotism but to sometimes get even more egotistical than normal people, and in some cases, they become highly indifferent to the well-being of the movement and to the fact that the well-being of the movement depends on not practicing what the outer world calls quackery. For a healing process of all of medicine should occur, and it should not be disturbed by the demands which individuals sometimes make because of their personal aspirations. This becomes very difficult, but it has to be done along these lines. We will succeed in this area only if in reply to false accusations from the outer world we can say: what is said there is definitely a lie, it is definitely made up. We will be able to say this simply because we know what is going on in the anthroposophical movement. In certain cases we will simply always have to be able to say this. However, we can only say this if we are inwardly initiated into everything which consists of such things as the ones to which I have drawn your attention here, namely that I will not directly intervene in therapy, but that the people who function as physicians within our anthroposophical movement are there to heal the patients.

In conclusion I would like to express to you my hope that these beginning impulses, although still mere indications, may be developed further by you, and that they become effective for the well-being of mankind. Hopefully we will have an opportunity to continue what we have now begun twice, and will at least make an effort to continue this in some way. With this wish I close these contemplations, my dear friends, and I hope that our deeds will correspond to our wishes in all these directions. It was very satisfying to see you here. It will be satisfying to think back to the days which you wanted to stay here, precisely for the enrichment of medical science, and the thoughts which shall hold us together will accompany you on the paths, my dear friends, on which you will walk to transform into deed what to begin with we tried to stimulate here in thoughts.

The scheduled lecturer is not here yet. I hope he will come soon, but I wouldn't like you to have to sit and simply wait, so I will make a few remarks. It is obvious that this series of lectures is particularly important in our course, for it needs to be shown in a practical realm how our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is really able to take hold in the practice of life. The realm of practical life concerning medicine and therapy is one of the most important, as everyone can experience it in his own body. For just this reason we must not fail to carry anthroposophy into medicine, even at the outset of our anthroposophical efforts.

In this course we have tried particularly to represent the various specialties with externally acknowledged specialists, for it is necessary, in presenting spiritual science to the world, that these various subjects be represented by professionals; otherwise they will not be accepted in the way they ought to be. Nevertheless, before the scheduled lecturer arrives, I will make the effort to say something to you about physiology and its relation to therapeutics from the viewpoint of spiritual science. Our theme today will touch on this. I will show you how spiritual science is being called upon to influence the study of medicine and also the practice of medicine, the entire art of medicine.

You know that in our higher education the actual study of medicine is ordinarily preceded by a preparatory study of natural science, following which is the actual study of medicine. After becoming acquainted more with the biological-physiological phenomena, therefore, one devotes oneself more to pathological phenomena in order to struggle through to therapy. Many of my listeners, however, are well aware of what short shrift therapy receives in this kind of study of medicine. Through its natural scientific orientation, the study of medicine is certainly led to comprehend natural processes in the human being. Then when the budding physician enters the realm of pathology, however, he approaches it with a particular view of natural processes by which he can scarcely gain a correct relationship to pathological processes.

It seems to me that a belief has arisen with a certain urgency in recent times. We have become accustomed to gaining a definite view of natural processes, of their inner coherence and underlying causality. In the healthy human being we must obviously search for the necessary causal connections between certain natural processes in accordance with this presupposition. In the ill human being, however, or, let us say, in the diseased organism, what can we look for except natural processes also proceeding basically with causal necessity? We are constrained to say that what confronts us in illness in these totally evident, causally determined natural processes is abnormal in relation to the healthy organism, falling out of the causal connections of the healthy organism in a certain way. In short, when we penetrate into the realm of medicine, we are immediately made uncertain and skeptical in relation to the approach to nature that underlies our modern view of natural events.

This paradox led to skepticism among many physicians, especially to the skepticism that I have described here previously, a kind of nihilism in relation to therapy. I was acquainted with the famous professors who were active on the medical faculty at the university in Vienna at the time when this faculty had reached its pinnacle; they were fundamentally therapeutic nihilists. Choosing an illness in their discussion to which their view was particularly applicable, they said that one can only allow an illness, pneumonia, for example, to take its own course, guiding this course along the proper path by means of calming, supportive measures or other outer measures until the crisis comes, whereupon the whole illness subsides. They said that it is not actually possible to speak in the true sense of what for centuries, for millennia, had been called healing.

If such a view were to lead to its logical consequences, medicine would gradually develop into a mere pathology, for in relation to the investigation of diseases, especially from the viewpoint of a materialistically minded natural science, therapeutic nihilism has been brought to an extraordinary fulfillment in our time.

At this point I would like to warn against a misunderstanding, that of believing that from here, and from the side of an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science generally, the great significance of modern natural science could go unrecognized and undervalued. This is absolutely not the case. Anyone who has looked even a little into the advances of the pathological method of investigation during the second half of the nineteenth century would have to be astonished, amazed, at its truly remarkable progress. In addition to this, however, he would have to penetrate to quite another recognition. He would have to say to himself that while materialism has certainly made its appearance, materialism alone cannot satisfy certain demands of human feeling; it is also unable to illuminate vast areas of human knowing.

This materialism nevertheless had a kind of mission, you could say. It developed in an extraordinarily precise way the capacity to conduct experimental research through observation. Something like our modern pathology, tainted as it is by its materialism, is possible exclusively due to this materialism. People are always judged harshly today when they are not one-sided, and when as editor and publisher of the Magazin fuer Literatur I wrote an article at Buechner's death that did not damn him but actually acknowledged his achievements, I was labeled a materialist. Yet this is just what is essential in experiencing and pursuing spiritual science, that one be able to transmute oneself into everything; everywhere one must be able to find the thought-form, the feeling-form, out of which perhaps even the most contradictory directions and world views are able to gather their forces; one must be able to honor the achievements that have proceeded from something like materialism, which, to be sure, must nevertheless be overcome in our time—it is simply a demand of the time.

I would like to draw your attention to something else however. You have heard here in the course of our lectures that we are striving for a phenomenology in science. You have also heard, and with the greatest possible justification, that there must even be a striving toward a chemistry free of hypotheses. I am quite sure that in many of the things that must be presented in relation to medicine and the practice of medicine, someone will discern one thing or another that strikes him as a hypothesis. It is necessary, however, especially if one begins to deliberate on the organic out of the inorganic, to delineate properly the concept of the hypothesis.

What is a hypothesis? Let us consider a very trivial matter from ordinary life. I have gone down a road and have seen a person along this road; I go further and no longer see him; I will not assume right away that this person has been swallowed up by the earth. This would be true in the least number of cases! Instead, I will look around me and possibly see a house. I can limit my thoughts so that I say to myself, “That person went into this house. I don't see him now, but he is inside.” This would not be making an unwarranted hypothesis; rather I am assuming thoughts hypothetically that come to me when something appears in the course of sense perception that must be explained by presupposing something certainly stemming from the sequence of my mental images but not seen directly, not actually able to be observed, which therefore is not a direct phenomenon for me. I would not be making an unwarranted hypothesis if I assumed something like that; similarly, I would not be making an unwarranted hypothesis if by some process I make warmth perceptible with a thermometer and then through congealing or a similar process I see this warmth disappear and then speak of the warmth that has disappeared as latent warmth.

It is absolutely necessary, therefore, especially if one wishes to conduct fruitful research, to pursue the sequence of sense images in one direction or another. An unwarranted hypothesis is one that has been arrived at by conceptions regarding which, were they to be followed through with insightful thinking, it becomes clear that what underlies them could never be perceived. Then one must endow these conceptions—and atomism, molecularism, are such conceptions—with ingredients that could never be perceived. Otherwise they could simply be perceived. For example, one can never surrender oneself to the illusion that, even if one were able to see the smallest constituents of solids through some process, light could then be explained by means of movement, for then light would be carried into these smallest parts.

I beg you on this occasion to make a clear distinction between justifiable sequential thinking within experience and making unwarranted hypotheses.

If we now return to our previous thoughts, we must say the following: we see before us on the one hand the so-called normal human being and on the other hand the diseased human being. By necessity we must recognize in both organizations a process occurring in accordance with nature. And yet how is one process related to the other? It is precisely the separation of physiology from pathology and therapy, which has become customary in recent times, that prevents us, in the transitions from one to the other, from arriving at the appropriate conceptions. Furthermore, the modern physician is basically unable to take the spiritual into consideration at all when he is engaged in the study of physiology, or even pathology, for this spiritual element is still an unknown in modern science's approach. It is therefore missing from all our considerations.

In contrasting clearly and plainly these two processes of nature—the physiological and the pathological—it is possible to offer for consideration certain extreme cases of the pathological, first in abstract form. Out of consideration of such extremes it will perhaps be possible to arrive at fruitful conceptions. In the beginnings of a science, you need not think of the existence, of the demand, of an absolute necessity. What one calls exactness, an inner necessity, can emerge only in the course of the consideration. Thus if a person wishes to consider a certain formation in nature, it is possible, you could say, to begin at any corner. Let us take an extreme case within the diseased human organism, one that presents modern medicine with an extraordinary number of difficulties: carcinoma-formation, cancer-formation.

We see something appear within this type of illness that reveals itself even to microscopic investigation as something organic, or at least as something that looks organic; and it appears in the ordinary organism in such a way that it gradually destroys the life of the rest of the organism. At first we can only say that we find something appearing within the bodily aspect of the human organism; this seems to ascend from unknown depths and to insert itself into the ordinary course of nature, disturbing this course.

We can also go to the other extreme of the pathological organism. We can see how something can arise that takes a normal activity in the human organism and develops it excessively into something abnormal. And then we consider a human organism as abnormal. I do not want to dwell particularly on these expressions, normal and abnormal, but they ought to be adequate for a preliminary discussion. In the course of our studies it will become evident that the normal simply passes in transition into the so-called abnormal, but for a preliminary discussion these expressions, normal and abnormal, can certainly be used.

When we encounter the normal human organization, we see that in the soul realm there develops a definite kind of willing, a definite kind of feeling, a definite kind of thinking. In social interchange we have gradually become accustomed to crystallizing a kind of normal picture, as it were, out of the mental images that we create from our association with people, a picture that guides us to consider as normal a person who, out of himself, shapes his willing, feeling, and thinking to a certain extent.

If we now make our thoughts just a bit more concrete, we necessarily reach the point of picturing an organism that functions too strongly, for example, functioning like an object in which there is latent warmth and from which we free this latent warmth, releasing far too much of this warmth into the environment. So much latent warmth is freed that we no longer have the slightest idea what to do with it. If the human organism acted in this way, so that too much was pressed out of it in this direction, certain results in the thought realm would be revealed to us. The emotional element, however, is always playing into the thought realm through feeling. Such a human organism would appear to be burdened within the thought realm by what we call the manic conditions. In such a human organism we therefore see something arising that appears to flood the organism with forces of organization that incline toward sense experience.

In carcinoma-formations, on the other hand, we have a condition in which the organizing force of nature appears within the organism, separating itself off, as it were; we have a condition in which this force of organization inserts itself into the organism. In the pathological phenomena of manic conditions or similar phenomena, something from the organism cannot be held in, as it were, and emanates out of the organism.

If I were to sketch this for you schematically, I would draw it in this way (see drawing): if I draw a circle around the normal formation of the human organism here, I would have to suggest the appearance of a carcinoma by drawing something in a certain spot (red); these are forces of growth that now adhere inwardly to the organism so that in this spot the organism must cast off something that otherwise would pour into the entire organism. If I wished to draw what appears from the other pole, in the case of the manic conditions, I would have to draw something (this is all intended to be schematic, of course) as if it were welling forth from the organism (blue), pressing toward the soul-spiritual.

Now you can imagine weaker versions of these most extreme cases that I have sketched here. Imagine that the first extreme did not reach the point of carcinoma-formation but was stopped on the way to forming a carcinoma. If it were stopped on the way to carcinoma-formation, then an organ (for of course what happens cannot take place in nothingness, cannot take place in the intermediate spaces of the organism) would simply be taken hold of, but the organ would unite itself with the force that normally would strive inward in carcinoma-formation and there fully emancipate itself; it would unite itself with something that is a normal force in an organ, and we would then be dealing with the disease of an organ, which can be designated in the most varied ways, as is customary in medicine.

Now let us consider a tendency toward the manic condition that has been arrested halfway to its culmination. Such a person would not be brought through the abnormality of his organization to the point where the soul-spiritual was fully outside him, as in clinically established mania; he would not reach the point of getting totally out of himself, as it were, the thought element taking its own course in an emotional way. The condition would remain halfway to the extreme, as it were; then we would have to do with various forms of so-called mental illness—“so-called,” I say—which can also appear in the most varied ways, from organically determined illusions, and so on, to conditions that barely manifest organically but that nevertheless are always based in the organism, conditions like hysteria and so on.

Here we have attempted to pursue in two directions phenomena that lead us from the normal into the pathological. I would like to show you what actually lies at the basis of this, but I will show this from another angle, not yet entirely from the realm of spiritual science, whose methods I have characterized as Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition; I will show it from a viewpoint reaching its understanding instead from a kind of instinct, but you will see that this understanding, if it does not wish to break through to the spiritual scientific path, remains stuck in the middle.

In the development of German cultural life we have an extraordinarily interesting phenomenon. Quite apart from how one evaluates Schelling as a philosopher, he is an interesting cultural-historical phenomenon. Even if everything he developed in his philosophy were false and distorted, a certain instinct lived in him for natural events, even in the realm in which ordinary natural science pursues natural events so unwillingly, where it relies more on a very crude empiricism. When the possibility presented itself to him, Schelling also sought to think medically; indeed he was extensively active even in issues concerning the healing process. In the history of modern philosophy little concern has been shown for how Schelling actually came, completely instinctively, to depart from mere abstract, logical-philosophical considerations and to immerse himself in a real study of nature itself, even of the organic. He even put out a journal that occupied itself to an exceptional extent with medical questions. How did this come about? This can become clear if one knows and understands rightly the value of the deep instinctual knowledge out of which Schelling drew his truths and his errors.

A saying thus emerged out of Schelling that was certainly not built on clear knowledge but, you could say, was hewn out of the instinctive element of the soul life, a remarkable saying. “To know nature,” he says, “means to create nature.” Indeed, if what is expressed in this sentence could be directly realized in human knowing, it would be easy for us to approach medicine. If we were able to take up the forces of creation in our knowing, if the forces of creation were present in our consciousness, then we could easily penetrate into the realm of physiological and pathological phenomena, for then we would be able to observe the steps that creative nature follows. The empirical view states quite simply that we cannot do this.

One who then proceeds further can say that it is precisely in the unrealizable nature of this demand exceeding human capacity, which Schelling proposed, that we find something we are not permitted to see into, a process such as the occurrence of new formations. Because we are unable to pursue the creation of nature directly with our knowing, we are unable to see into the place where new formations appear; this means that without something further we are unable to pursue the existence of material processes such as come to expression, for example, in carcinoma-formation. By putting together what is actually denied to us there—our being unable to accomplish the instinctive demand of a highly gifted man that “to know nature means to create nature”—by putting together the unrealizable nature of this demand with what nevertheless appears to us in the carcinomatous process, it will be revealed how one must approach such processes in the body.

Of course Schelling has not spoken out of instinct from the other side. Consider just once the polar opposite to what Schelling has said. His sentence stands as: “To know nature means to create nature,” which we are unable to accomplish; from the other side the sentence would stand as, “To know the spirit means to destroy the spirit.” This sentence has hitherto been expressed only by spiritual scientists, and even then only shrouded in a certain mysterious darkness: “To know the spirit means to destroy the spirit.” If we are unable to create nature, so we are also unable—we wish to present this first through an analogy, for then we can speak of it further—so we are also unable, out of our human capacity, to destroy the spirit. We cannot penetrate with our knowing to the point where the destruction of the spiritual begins. But you may already sense that here there arises a certain kinship to manic or similar conditions, for there too something destructive in the spirit arises. And the relationship must be sought between those normal human capacities that are unable to create nature in knowing it and those that are unable to destroy the spirit in knowing it.

Here I have simply sketched for you the path, something that must lead us directly from a normal, though instinctive, more deeply stimulated consciousness into a relationship of the human being to nature. We will see in the further course of our presentations that this path suggested here can lead us to what actually must be sought in the transition from physiology to pathology.

I hope that it will no longer be necessary for me to be the speaker tomorrow, but if that turns out to be the case I will try in the course of the next few days to continue at least sketchily the considerations begun this evening.

Today I wish to make a link with what I said yesterday at the conclusion of the lecture. I pointed then to a personality who was driven by his philosophical instincts, as it were, from knowledge of the soul-spiritual into an intimation of the connection of this soul-spiritual with the physical-bodily existence of the human being. This was Schelling. I said that out of these instincts Schelling not only occupied himself with theoretical medicine but also with all kinds of therapeutic treatments. I do not know whether this resulted in greater or lesser satisfaction for the patient than is the case with many well-trained physicians, for this question of how much improvement in a person's condition can be attributed to therapeutic measures is, in most cases, a very problematic one if it is not looked at inwardly.

This instinct arose in Schelling out of the entire disposition of his soul, and from this he acquired a principle. It would certainly be good if this became a kind of inner principle for every physician, became an inner principle so that the physician would coordinate his entire practical conception of the nature of the healthy and sick human being out of this principle. I quoted Schelling's own words, which show a kind of daring. He simply said, “To know nature means to create nature.” Generally what is first noticed when a genius comes forth with such an expression is its quite obvious absurdity, for no one seriously believes himself capable, as an earthly human being in the physical body, of creating anything out of nature simply by knowing nature. Obviously in technology there is continuous creation, but there it is not a matter of really creating something in the way that Schelling meant; rather, by putting things together, by a composition of the forces of nature, nature in turn is given the opportunity to create in a particular way and through a particular arrangement, and so on. With this sentence, therefore, we have fundamentally to do with an absurdity that a man of genius laid at the foundation of all his thinking.

Yesterday I indicated another sentence that could be contrasted with, “To know nature means to create nature,” and this sentence would be, “To know the spirit means to destroy the spirit.” This last sentence was probably not expressed by Schelling in such a fundamental way. In modern times, however, a person who once again approaches a spiritual science, developing his own spiritual investigation, sees that both these sentences basically point back to an ancient knowledge from inspiration. Schelling, who certainly was by no means an initiate but simply a man of genius, could arrive at the first sentence out of his instinct. When a person pursues the kind of spiritual investigation that was not being done in Schelling's time, this sentence immediately recalls a resounding from ancient wisdom. Then one is carried over to the other sentence, which resounds in a similar way from ancient wisdom. Neither sentence can be comprehended with the customary modern intellectual knowledge that we apply in our sciences. Considered either in relation to each other or by themselves, these phrases are absurd. They both point, however, to something of the greatest importance in the human organization, something as important for the healthy condition as for the diseased condition.

When we consider outer nature in relation to the finished processes of nature, we can say nothing more than that “To know nature means at most to recreate nature in thoughts.” Therefore what we call our thoughts bring us no further than recreating nature since they lack the inner formative force; this is what we develop in our thinking, in the soul life permeated by thoughts, by mental images. It has been pointed out previously, however, that this soul life permeated by mental images is basically nothing but what emancipates itself from the physical-etheric organism at the time of the change of teeth, what the human being therefore has within the physical-etheric organism until the change of teeth.

What is active in the human physical-etheric during the childhood years, what truly engages in a creative activity, thus remains in a weakened form, toned down in the soul life as a world of pictures or a world of thoughts or mental images, in short, as a world force in thoughts and mental images, a force in its creative substantiality. It simply sits in our organism; what we know from age seven on simply sits within our organism in an organizing way. It creates there, but not at all, in the same as we are able to see it creating in outer nature; we see it creating within our own organism. Thus if a child were already a sage and were able to express himself not about outer nature but rather about what goes on within him, if the child were able to look within to his inner nature and penetrate nature there, he would say, “To know this nature means to create this nature.” The child would simply saturate himself with the creating forces, would become one with these creating forces. And in his medical instinct, in his physiological instinct, Schelling merely stated something that for the entire later life is absurd; he drew forth something from the age of childhood and extended it by saying, as it were: all this knowing in old age is nothing but a faint web of images; if one were able to know as a child, one would have to say that to know actually means to create, means to develop creative activity. We are able to see this creative activity, however, only in our own inner being.

What is it, therefore, that actually confronts us as creative activity in our own inner being, which is expressed in a genius such as Schelling as I have indicated? It is true, isn't it, that the nature of genius is generally based on the fact that the person retains a certain childlike quality in later life. Those people who age no matter what happens and who take up aging in a normal way, as it were, take it up appropriately never become geniuses. It is people who carry into later life something of a positive, creative-childlike element who bear the quality of genius. It is this childlike element, this positive creative element, this knowing-creative element that—if I want to express myself in a simple way—does not have time to know things outwardly because it turns the forces of knowledge inward and begins: to create. This is the heritage that we bring with us in entering physical existence through birth. We bring with us the forces of organization, and we can perceive them, as it were, through spiritual science. And a person like Schelling sensed them instinctively.

Anyone who acquires such perception knows that these soul-spiritual forces that permeate the organism in an organizing way in the first period of childhood do not completely cease being active with the change of teeth. They have undergone only one stage. They become suppressed, as it were, to a lesser degree of activity so that later we definitely still retain in us the organizing forces. We have conquered in ourselves, however, the memory-forming element that entered consciousness with the change of teeth, detaching itself thereby from the organization. We have taken memory from its latent state into its liberated state; we have received as a soul-perceptive force our growth force, our force of movement, our force of balance, which were active in a correspondingly heightened degree in the first period of childhood. You can see from this, however, that in normal human development, this organizing force, this growth force, must be transformed to a degree into something soul-spiritual, let us say, into the force of memory, into the thought-forming force.

Let us assume, now, that too much of this organizing force active in the first period of childhood were held back due to some process; picture a development in which insufficient forces of organization were transformed into the memory-forming force. These forces then remain stuck below in the organism; they are not carried properly into sleep each time a person falls asleep but rather continue to course through the organism between falling asleep and awakening.

If an individual engaged in medical, physiological-phenomenological research in the direction I can only suggest in this short course of lectures, he would be led to the insight that it is possible for forces in the human organism[,] that should actually enter the soul-spiritual at the proper turning-point in life instead[,] to remain below in the physical organization. Then what I spoke to you about yesterday occurs. If the normal degree of organization-forces is transformed with the change of teeth, then in later life we have the proper degree of forces in the organism to organize this organism in accord with its normal shape and normal structure. If we have not done this, however, if we have transformed too little, then the organizing forces that remain below appear somewhere and we encounter new formations, carcinomatous formations, about which I spoke yesterday. In this way—just as Troxler suggested in the first half of the nineteenth century—we can study the process of becoming ill or of illness that occurs in the moments of transition in later life.

We can then compare this with childhood illnesses, for obviously childhood illnesses cannot have the same origin, because they appear in an early stage of life when absolutely nothing has yet been transformed. If one has learned the origin of illnesses in later life, however, one has also acquired a capacity to observe what underlies the origin of illnesses in childhood. One finds the same thing, in a certain way, only from another side. One finds that there is too much of the soul-spiritual force of organization in the human organism when childhood illnesses arise. To an individual who has acquired the capacity to perceive along these lines, such things appear especially significant when considering the phenomena of scarlet fever or measles in childhood. With these he can see in the child's organism how the soul-spiritual, which otherwise functions in a normal way, begins to stir; he sees how it is more active than it should be. The whole course of these illnesses becomes comprehensible the moment one really sees this restless stirring of the soul-spiritual in the organism as the basis of illness.

Now, I beg you to consider my next sentence very precisely, for I never go a step further than is justified by the deliberations preceding it, even if much may be suggested only sketchily; everywhere I merely indicate how far one can go, so I am not drawing a conclusion here. I am simply saying that now one is not far from recognizing something that is extraordinarily important to recognize for a true knowledge. First we must arrive at the point of recognizing that in an illness of the human organism during later life, one that goes in the direction of new formations, there is too much of the organizing force that results in an island of organization, so to speak. When we have reached this point we are not far from saying that, if the later period of life points in this way back to earliest childhood, this indicates ultimately that what reveals itself in childhood points back to the time before birth or, let us say, before conception; it points back to the soul-spiritual existence of the human being before he was clothed with a physical body. A person suffering from childhood illnesses is simply someone who brought along too much of the soul-spiritual from his prehuman, pre-earthly life; this excess then lives itself out in the childhood illnesses.

In the future there will be no choice but to allow oneself to be driven beyond the fruitless, materialistic approaches in which physiological and therapeutic matters remain stuck today, to be driven on to a soul-spiritual approach. It will soon be seen that what arises in spiritual science does not occur because the spiritual investigator is too little grounded in physical research, because he is, as it were, a dilettante in physical research (though I must add parenthetically that many who call themselves spiritual investigators are, in fact, dilettantes, but this is not how it should be). It is not necessary for the spiritual investigator to be grounded too little in physical research in order to become a spiritual investigator; rather he must be even more immersed in physical research than the ordinary natural scientist. If he sees through phenomena more intensively, he will be driven by the phenomena themselves into the soul-spiritual, especially when it comes to illness.

The sentence, “To know the spirit means to destroy the spirit,” is actually an absurdity similar to the first sentence, yet this sentence also points to something that must be recognized, that must be penetrated. Just as the sentence, “To know nature means to create nature,” points us to the first age of childhood, and actually to life before birth—if we extend it in the right way—so the sentence, “To know the spirit means to destroy the spirit,” leads us to the end of a person's life, to what kills the human being. You need only hold to this sentence in a paradoxical way—“To know the spirit means to destroy the spirit”—and you will find how one must not follow it but how it nevertheless exists in life as something continually being approached asymptotically.

For an individual who doesn't simply grasp knowledge aggressively but develops self-perception in the right way, to know the spirit means to see continual processes of breakdown, continual processes of destruction in the human organism. When we look into the creative age of childhood in the same way, we can see continuous upbuilding processes, but upbuilding processes that have the peculiarity of actually dimming consciousness. Therefore we are dreaming, we are half-asleep in childhood; our consciousness is not fully awake. Our own earthly spirituality, namely the conscious spirituality of pressing back the growth activity, is what actually organizes us inwardly. The moment this force enters consciousness, it ceases to permeate us with organizing forces to the same degree as before.

In looking into the age of childhood one witnesses the work of upbuilding forces, though forces that weaken consciousness; in the same way one witnesses the breakdown processes when surrendering oneself to perceiving the developed thinking processes, but these breakdown processes are particularly suited to making our consciousness clear and luminous.

Modern physiological science pays little attention to this, although this is perfectly obvious in physiology's revelations, as obvious as can be. If you direct your attention to the real revelations of modern physiology, you will see that everything known about the physiology of the brain makes it quite clear that with soul-spiritual processes occurring consciously we do not have to do with any kind of growth forces or forces that take up nourishment; rather we have to do with processes of elimination in the nervous system, with breakdown processes, with a continuous slow dying.

It is death that is active in us when we surrender ourselves to what is spiritually active in our consciousness. And just as we look through the unconscious creating forces to the beginnings of life, so we look through the conscious conceptual forces that reveal themselves as destructive forces; they reveal themselves as what begins to take hold of us more and more as we grow into earthly life, to break us down, and finally to lead us to confront earthly death; we see through these forces to the other end of life, to death. Birth and death—or, let us say, conception, birth, and death—can only be understood by taking the spiritual into consideration.

And what wants to be expressed in the sentence, “To know the spirit means to destroy the spirit,” is this: if a person wishes only to gaze into the spirit, to take it up more or less naively, to take it up in the same way that outer nature is taken up, then that individual would have to dam up what is active in this thinking, conceptual, sensing and feeling activity; the breakdown would have to be prevented. This means that in such a moment a person would have to diminish, to weaken, the power over the spirit, the inner consciousness, to the point of unconsciousness, to a working of the spiritual in unconsciousness. He would have to come to the point of forming something spiritual out of himself, of pressing something spiritual out of himself, as it were. To do this, however, he could not remain conscious, because the organization cannot be carried into this breakdown process, into this spiritual process.

Thus we can say that on the one hand we have the processes of organization that consist of the fact that we have the form-skeleton of the human organism, as it were (see drawing a), into which the organizing force (drawing b, red) enters as something spiritual. (Of course this is now considered abstractly.) On the other hand, as I have described in the second case, we have the form-skeleton of the human organism, but we do not wish to allow it to be permeated by the organizing force, by the force that weakens our consciousness to a certain extent: instead we wish to drive out the organizing force, which we now want to know as spirit (see drawing c). We cannot go along with our ego, however, because this is bound to the organism.

We have the other side as well, the side in which man clearly begins to develop the spiritual, that is, to develop will activity in the spiritual. This permeation with will activity remains unconscious, sleeping, as it were, dreaming; based in this permeation with will activity is a soul-spiritual element that we actually bring forth from our organization without consciousness. Here we have the other side, the manic side, the frenzied side, in which the human being goes mad; we have the varying forms of the so-called mental illnesses. Whereas with physical illnesses we have a soul-spiritual element that does not belong in the physical organism (drawing b), with the so-called mental illnesses we have something in the psychological realm that drives out of the physical-etheric something that should remain within it (drawing c). Something is driven out of the organism.

Today we will see what we arrived at yesterday illuminated from the other side. This viewpoint can lead us still further. We will see tomorrow the fruitful therapeutic consequences that can be arrived at particularly from this viewpoint, consequences that can then be confirmed absolutely in life, proving themselves in the most outward practice of medicine, in practical therapeutic measures.

If we are looking for the cause of physical illness, we must ultimately seek it in the spirit going astray in the organism. This should certainly not be pursued abstractly. Anyone who does not understand the relationship between the soul-spiritual and the physical organism should really stay quiet about these matters. Only with knowledge of the soul-spiritual element can one come to know the specific aspects of this: where in one organ or another there is too strong a force of organization, a hypertrophied force of organization, as it were; these details can be arrived at only if one knows the soul-spiritual concretely. The soul-spiritual element is made concrete in the same way as the physical-bodily element in the liver, stomach, and so on, and one must know this soul-spiritual element (of which psychology has no intimation) with its constituents, its members, just as well as we know the physical-sensible. And if the relationships between the two are known, then one can often indicate—even out of the soul-spiritual findings encountered with the human being—where there is some kind of excessive organization in a particular organ. In every case that is not the result of an external injury, such an origin can be indicated.

On the other hand, if we are considering the so-called mental illnesses, we remain purely in abstractions if we believe that anything can be gained from a half-baked phenomenology, if we believe that simply by describing soul-spiritual abnormalities one can arrive at anything (though to describe them is, of course, most useful). With such descriptions one can naturally create a sensation among laymen, because it is always interesting to learn how a person who has gone mad deviates from life's normal standard. Anything unusual is interesting, and in our time it is still rare to deviate in this way from normal life. But to remain stuck in simple description should not be the important thing. It is particularly important not to press on from that point to the dilettantish judgment that in such cases the soul and spirit are ill and that the soul and spirit can be cured somehow by soul-spiritual measures, as is commonly dreamed up by those who remain stuck in abstractions.

Indeed not. Particularly with the so-called mental illnesses it is absolutely clear that in every case one can indicate where the diminished organization of some organ resides. An individual who truly wishes to know the nature of melancholia or hypochondria driven to the point of mental illness must not wade around in the soul element; he should rather attempt to determine, from the condition of the abdominal organs of the person in question, how the diminished organization is influencing the person's abdominal organization. He should attempt to determine how a force of organization that works less strongly than normal allows something to precipitate out, so to speak—just as in chemistry one precipitates something out of a solution so that a sediment occurs—how a diminished force of organization in the physical-bodily element, which would otherwise be permeated by the force of organization, precipitates something out and how this precipitate is then present in the organism as something physical-bodily, how it is deposited in what takes place in the liver, gall, stomach, heart, and lungs. These processes are not so accessible to investigation as one would like nowadays, when people prefer to stick to the crude aspects—for histology also remains at the crude level. Psychology is necessary to such an investigation, but in every case it is necessary to lead the study of so-called mental illnesses back to the bodily condition.

Of course such illnesses may seem less interesting as a result, but this is nevertheless the case. It naturally seems more interesting if a hypochondriac can say that his soul life is active in such-and-such a way in the soul-spiritual cosmos than to say that there is a diminished force of organization in his liver. It is more interesting to look for the causes of hysteria, let us say, in the soul-spiritual; it is more interesting than if one simply points to the metabolic processes of the sexual organs when speaking of hysterical phenomena or if one speaks of irregularities in the metabolism that spread throughout the organism. Little will be learned about these things, however, if the investigation is not pursued in this way.

Spiritual science is not always simply seeking the spirit. This can be left quietly to the spiritualists and other interesting people—interesting because they are rare, though unfortunately they are not rare enough! Spiritual science does not incessantly speak about spirit, spirit, spirit; rather it attempts really to lay hold of the spirit, and it tries to pursue its effects and succeeds by means of this in reaching the correct place for a comprehension of the material. It is certainly not so arrogant as to try to explain mental illnesses abstractly by mental means; instead it leads, particularly in the case of mental illness, to a material grasp of mental illness.

One may thus say that it points in a clarifying way to some interesting phenomena. One need not look back very far—perhaps still with Griesinger and others, or in the pre-Griesinger era in psychiatry—to discover that not so long ago psychiatrists also at least incorporated the bodily condition in their diagnoses. But what has become more and more common today? It has become commonplace for psychiatrists to flood us with descriptions of illness in their literature that merely describe the soul-spiritual abnormalities, so that here materialism has actually led us into an abstract soul-spiritual domain. This is its tragedy. Here materialism itself has led away from materialism. This is what is so remarkable about materialism, that in certain regards it leads to a misunderstanding, to a lack of comprehension of the material world itself. One who pursues the spirit as a real fact, however, also pursues it where it works its way into the material and where it then withdraws so that the material is deposited, as in the so-called mental illnesses.

I had to present these things as a foundation in order to offer guidelines in relation to the therapeutic aspect tomorrow. What we discover when the physiological therapeutic domain is fructified with spiritual science also has a social aspect. Life is remarkable in that everywhere we are driven into the social element if we are not seeking the scientific in an abstract withdrawal, in an academic existence estranged from life, but rather in the life-filled comprehension of human existence, of human community, if we are seeking with a truly living science. As an example, we have an extraordinarily interesting social phenomenon in recent evolution: through the split of humanity upward into a bourgeois aristocracy and downward into the proletariat, we can see how the one-sided aristocratic nature is taken hold of by a false seeking after the spirit, by materialism in the spiritual realm, while the proletarian nature is taken hold of by a certain spiritualism in the material realm.

What does that mean—spiritualism in the material realm? It means remaining stuck when seeking the origins of existence. The proletariat has thus developed scientific materialism as a view of life at the same time as the aristocratic element has developed the teachings of the spirit materialistically. While the proletariat has become materialistic, the aristocracy has become spiritualistic. If you find spiritualists among the proletariat, they did not grow out of their own proletarian soil; rather it is a mimicry, it is simply imitative, merely something that penetrated the proletariat by an infection—I will speak about infection tomorrow—with the aristocratic-bourgeois element.

And if you see among the aristocracy the development of materialism, coming to behold spirits materially as one looks at flames, so that materialism is carried into the most spiritual, wanting to see the spiritual materially, then we see this growing out of the original, decadent one-sidedness that emerged from the universally human, from the totality inclining to the aristocratic, to the bourgeois element, infected by the aristocratic element.

If what applies to the spirit is compelled to remain in matter, because it has not been drawn out by an appropriate education or the like, if in its spiritual seeking the proletariat is compelled to remain in matter, then materialism develops as a view of life. Materialism was developed by the proletariat as a view of life in the materialistic understanding of history, for example. Materialism was developed by more aristocratic people as spiritualism, for spiritualism is materialism, masked materialism, which does not even remain honest enough to acknowledge it; instead it lies and maintains that those who profess things materialistically are actually spiritual. After this divergence, we will continue tomorrow with our studies.

In the short time available to us for this therapeutic portion of our meeting, it will naturally only be possible to speak in a general way about specific therapeutic measures. On the other hand, it is always questionable whether one should speak in detail about specifics, especially in medicine, if one is not speaking to a purely professional audience, as was the case when I gave a series of lectures in the spring (see Note 1). For the future development of humanity, it will indeed be necessary that the widest circles are familiar with the guiding principles of healing in order that a trusting relationship, well-grounded in facts, may develop between physician and patient. Though it will be necessary for such an understanding of the guidelines for medicine and social hygiene to be sought in the widest circles, it will nevertheless remain undesirable for an excessively dilettantish and lay judgment to intervene in medical matters; due to the state of medicine in modern times, this happens far too frequently today.

It must be firmly stressed that I have absolutely no intention of encouraging any kind of quackery. Within our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science we must instead strive to bring spiritual scientific knowledge into a true medical art based on a methodical study of medical science. We therefore will not align ourselves with those who, out of an unlimited ignorance concerning what they are actually speaking about, attack nearly everything they call academic medicine and the like. We should certainly not align ourselves with these people.

Something else must also be considered in discussing matters like those that will be raised today. Though in a certain sense this has been the case for a long time, something has permeated medicine particularly in modern times; this aspect has asserted itself in our time with all the vehemence with which matters tend to assert themselves in our chaotic social order: this is the formation of partisan groups even within the medical field. And these parties struggling among themselves are no better than political parties. In general it is quite clear that this cannot support the development of medicine. The battle between the allopaths and the homoeopaths, between the so-called academic physicians and those using natural remedies and so on, has generated a great deal of confusion in the understanding of medicine that is required in the wider circles of humanity. I needed to make these introductory remarks today so that what I have to say will not be placed on false ground.

I have already directed your attention to how, on the one hand, the soul-spiritual stands within the human process of organization; this then proliferates, as it were, in the physical processes of illness so that the soul-spiritual cannot work separately from the physical organ, as it should, thus wreaking havoc in it. When this happens we are faced with all those illnesses that tend toward new formations in the organism .

By contrast, we are also concerned with illnesses in which the soul-spiritual develops in such a way that it does not take sufficient hold of the physical organism, whereupon certain parts of the physical organism are abandoned, not to processes taken hold of by the human organization but to subordinate processes of natural existence. In this way organs “physicalize”—if I may use such a word—to an excessive degree rather than permeating themselves soul-spiritually. The soul-spiritual then flows out without being encompassed in the right way by the ego-consciousness, and as a result all the forms of illness arise that we designate inaccurately as mental illnesses (see Note 2).

This view must be modified, however, the moment one proceeds from a sound physiology to a sound pathology and therapy; it must he modified by being developed still more precisely. It must incorporate the view of the nature of the human being that has been presented here repeatedly, though in very different connections from those we require today: this is the view of the threefold nature of the human organism.

On the one hand we have to do with a threefold nature of the soul being: in forming mental images, in feeling, and in will impulses. This threefold nature of the soul being, however, corresponds very precisely with a threefolding of the physical-bodily being: a kind of head system or nerve-sense system, a rhythmic system, and a metabolic-limb system. I must stress particularly that this constitution of the human organism must not be understood merely intellectually but through inner perception. A person would be unable to comprehend how matters actually stood if he remained with an external picture, if he understood the head system as something that simply ends at the neck, the circulatory or rhythmic system as being encompassed by the trunk, while the digestive system encompasses the limb system, the sexual system.

What is important here is that while the nerve-sense system is located primarily in the head, it nevertheless extends over the entire remaining organism as such. We may thus say that when we speak here with an anthroposophical purpose about the nerve-sense system, it is the system of functions in the human organism (for we are concerned here not with spatial limitations but functional limitations) that is located essentially in the head; nevertheless the head activity extends over the entire human being so that in a certain sense the whole human being is head. The same is true for the other systems. It was thus mere foolishness when a superficial professor of medicine, who did not intend really to study these matters but only wished to discredit them to the world, spoke about the “belly-system” in order to ridicule what is actually referred to by the metabolic system. He has merely shown his total lack of understanding for how the threefold constitution of the human being is functional, and not defined by spatial limitations.

When an individual really understands this constitution of the human being—about which many lectures could be given to describe it in full detail—he reaches the point of being able to perceive clearly the distinctions between the head system, and therefore the nerve-sense system, on the one hand, the metabolic-limb system on the other hand, and the mediating system, the rhythmic system, whose essential role is to bring about the balance between the two other systems.

If we thus wish to encompass the entire nature of the human being, we must consider the following. The actual conceptual and perceptual activity of the human being has as its basis—one cannot even say as its tool, but as its physical basis—everything that takes place physically in the nerve-sense system. It is not the case, as is suggested by modern psychology and physiology, that those processes connected primarily with the feeling and willing systems also take place in the nerve-sense system. Such an opinion does not hold up before a more precise study of the issue. You will find such a precise study, at least suggested in its outlines, in my book, Riddles of the Soul (see Note 3).

Much detailed work must still be done in this regard, however. Then what spiritual science has to say with certainty from its side will be elaborated from the other side, from the physical-empirical side. It will become clear that man's feeling is not connected in a primary way with the nerve-sense system but with the rhythmic system, that just as the nerve-sense system corresponds to mentally active perception, so the rhythmic system corresponds to feeling. Only through the interaction of the rhythmic system with the nerve-sense system, by the roundabout route of the rhythm in the cerebral fluid, pulsating against the nerve-sense system, is the nerve-sense system engaged as the carrier of the conceptual life. Then, if we raise our feelings to mental images, the dull, dreamlike life of feelings is perceived and pictured by us in an inner way. Just as the life of feeling is directly connected with the rhythmic system and is indirectly mediated by it, so the life of will is connected directly with the metabolic system. This connection in turn acts in a secondary way, since metabolism takes place also in the brain, of course, so that the metabolic system in its functions presses against the nerve-sense system. In this way we are able to bring forth the mental images of our will impulses, which otherwise would unfold in a dull sleep-life within our organism.

Thus you can see that in the human organism we have three different systems that carry the soul life in different ways. These systems do not simply differ from one another; they actually oppose each other (as I said, I can only sketch these matters today) so that on one side we have the nerve-sense system and on the other side all that constitutes the functions of the metabolic system, the metabolic-limb system (see drawing). Regarding the connection of the metabolism with the limbs, you can arrive at appropriate images if you simply consider the influence of the moving limbs on the metabolism. This influence is much greater than is ordinarily assumed in outer consciousness.

These two systems, however, the nerve-sense system and the metabolic-limb system, are in opposition, are polar opposites in a certain way. This polar opposition must be studied carefully in order to arrive at a sound pathology and therapy, particularly a pathology that could lead organically over into therapy; it must be studied carefully in all its countless individual details. If one enters into the detailed effects, it becomes evident that what I suggested yesterday is truly the case.

Within everything connected with the head system or nerve-sense system, we have breakdown processes, so that while our conceptual activity takes place in the waking state, when we perceive and form mental images, this activity is not bound up with growth and upbuilding processes but with breakdown processes, processes of elimination. This can be grasped if one looks in a sound way at what empirical-physiological science has already presented concerning this. There is already empirical evidence or to express it better, empirical corroboration—for what spiritual science provides through its perception. You need only pursue what certain inspired physiologists are able to present about the physical processes in the nervous system, which unfold as parallel phenomena to perceiving and forming mental images. You will see then that this assertion is certainly well supported, the assertion that when we think, when we think and perceive wakefully, we have to do with processes of elimination and breakdown, not with upbuilding processes. By contrast, where the will processes are mediated for the human being in the metabolic-limb system we are concerned with upbuilding processes.

All individual functions in the human being definitely interact with one another, however. If we look at the matter correctly, we must say that the upbuilding processes from below work up into the breakdown processes, and that the breakdown processes from above work down into the upbuilding processes. Then if you pursue this logically you have the rhythmic processes as a balancing system, as functions introducing the balance between the upbuilding processes and the breakdown processes, rhythmic processes that press breakdown into build-up and build-up into breakdown.

If we do not study the matter purely outwardly, we see that in the so-called blood circulation of the heart, in the aeration of the human body, we have everywhere special processes, as it were, that are somehow interrupted. I cannot go further now into this interruption, which has its purpose, but everywhere we have a specialization of this rhythmic curve that I have sketched here (see drawing). The course of breathing is a special aspect of this curve, the process that you draw if you follow the course of the blood from the heart upward toward the head or respectively toward the lungs and down to the rest of the body. Thus you have a specialization of these processes. In short, if you enliven what is suggested here, you penetrate into the functional tissue of the human organism, not in the dead way that is customary but in a living way. To do so you must enliven your own mental images. A mobile image of the human organism can thus be pictured. The human organism cannot be encompassed with static, abstract mental images, as modern physiology and pathology would like to encompass it today; it must instead be grasped with mental images in movement, with mental images that can really penetrate into the working of something that has inner movement, that is in no way merely a mechanical interaction of organs situated at rest in relation to one another.

We thus can see that within the human organism there is basically a continuous interaction between the breakdown processes, the deadening processes, and the upbuilding processes, the growth or proliferative processes. The human organization cannot be grasped without this activity.

What is actually present there, however? Let's look at the matter more precisely. If the breakdown process of the nerve-sense organization works into the metabolic-limb system through rhythm, something is present there that works against the metabolic-limb system, something that is a poison for this metabolic-limb system. The reverse is also the case, that what is present in the upbuilding system, working into the head system in rhythm, is a poison for the head system. And since, as I have indicated, the systems are spread out over the entire organism, a poisoning and unpoisoning are continuously taking place everywhere in the human organism, and this is brought into balance by the rhythmic processes.

We are therefore unable to regard such a natural process as taking its course one-sidedly, in the way that one normally pictures things, so that healthy processes are simply designated as normal. Rather we look into two processes working against one another, where one is a process that is thoroughly illness-engendering for the other. We simply cannot live in the physical organism at all without continuously exposing our metabolic-limb system to the causes of illness from the head system and exposing the head system to the causes of illness from the metabolic system. A scale that is not balanced properly is thrown out of balance by entirely natural laws so that the beam does not rest on the horizontal; similarly life, because it is in constant movement within itself, does not simply exist in a state of balanced rest but rather exists in a state of balance that can deviate in both directions toward irregularities.

Healing, then, means simply that if the head system, for example, is working in a way too strongly poisonous on the metabolic system, its poisoning effect is relieved, its poisonous effect is taken away. If, on the other hand, the metabolic-limb system is working in a way too strongly poisonous on the head system, which means working over abundantly: then its poisonous effect must also be removed.

It is possible to arrive at a comprehensive view of this realm, however, only if one now extends what can be observed in the human being to the observation of all nature, if one is able to grasp all nature in a spiritual scientific sense. If you look at the plant-forming process, for example, you can see clearly and macroscopically the upward striving of plant-forming processes, a striving away from the center of the earth. You may make a stimulating study of this metamorphosing formative striving of the plants, at least in a rudimentary way, on the basis of the guidelines offered in Goethe's Metamorphosis of the Plants. In Goethe's Metamorphosis of the Plants there is a sketchy rendering of the first composition, the first elements that are to be studied about the nature of the plant in this direction, but the direction of such a study must be developed further. The initial guidelines must be pursued, for then we may obtain a living view of everything involved in plant growth: when rooting in the soil the plant's upward-striving develops in a negative direction in the root; the plant begins to grow, then grows upward, overcoming the force of attraction of the earth prevailing in the root; then it wrestles through other forces in order to come ultimately to blossom, fruit, and seed formation. A great deal takes place upon this path.

On this path, for example, an opposing force once again intervenes. The opposing force that intervenes can be well observed if you study, simply to take an example, the common birch, betula alba. Pursue very precisely the process that takes place from the root formation through the trunk formation, particularly the bark formation. Consider how, on the basis of everything that works together in the trunk and bark formation, there develops what later comes into manifestation in the leaf formation. This can be studied particularly well in a spiritual scientific way if the still-brownish young birch leaves are studied in the spring.

If this is studied vividly, one also receives a view of forces self-metamorphosing, forces that are active there within the plant. One receives a view of how, on the one hand, there is a formative force active in the process of plant formation that works from below upward. On the other hand it is also possible to behold the force that retards, which in the root still, works strongly as the force of gravity but which, as the plant wrestles itself free from the earthly substance out into the air, is able to work together in another way with the upward-striving force. We then reach an interesting stage, a stage very helpful in understanding how in plant formation during this upward-striving process certain salts, potassium salts, are deposited in the birch bark; this is simply the result of the interaction of the forces working downward with the forces working upward, tending toward protein-formation, you could say, toward what I would like to designate as the albuminizing force formation.

In this way it is possible to penetrate into the plant-forming process. I can only indicate this here. By looking at how the potassium salts are deposited in the birch bark, how something wrestles itself free from this force drawing downward (a process somewhat comparable to what happens when a salt precipitates out of a solution), coming to the process that takes place when the solution rids itself of the salt, we come to see, to grasp in a living way, the process of protein formation, the process I would designate as the albuminizing process. We thus have a path to study what outwardly surrounds the human being, to study it vividly.

Then when we look back at the human being, we can see how, fundamentally speaking, the human being has the same form of forces in him—if we consider the breakdown process working from above downward—that work from below upward in the plant. We can see that in what is active in the forces working downward from the head system toward the metabolic-limb system there is something like an inverted plant element active within us. We can see that in fact those forces that we see sent upward in plant growth work in a downward direction in the human being. If the human being inappropriately holds back this process of plant formation active within him, so that he doesn't permeate the bodily life in the right way with what is active in the head—the astral, the ego-being—and if this then penetrates the bodily nature, this penetration expressing itself within the body, then something is held up there, something that should proceed into the human organism. We thus have to do with a pathological phenomenon like that which confronts us, for example, in cases of rheumatism or gouty conditions. If we study what is brought about in the human organism when this breakdown process is dammed up in a certain way, we discover its effects in the process of rheumatism, in the process of gout-formation, and so on.

Let us now shift our gaze again from within the organism to a process of plant formation like the one we have in the betula alba. From this we can arrive at the following. We look on the one hand into what takes place in salt formation and on the other hand into protein formation. We find, if we understand this process of protein formation in the right way, that the opposite process is within it and is held up there. We find held up in the organism that process which should take place in a way similar to the correct process of albuminizing in the leaves of the birch. We are thus able to come to the relationship between those processes that take place in the birch leaves, for example, and the processes within the organism if we process what is in the birch leaves into remedies. We can then give these remedies to the human being, by means of which we can bring about a healing, because the remedy correctly opposes this damming-up process that occurs in rheumatism and gout. In this way we look both at what is taking place outside in nature and at what takes place within the organism, and then we arrive at an idea of how we should guide the healing forces.

On the other hand we can see instances when the breakdown processes proceed in such a way that the organism cannot restrain them so that they pour themselves downward, and the rhythmic system does not press them back in the right way; they thus reach the periphery of the body pressing outward, as it were, toward the skin. Then we get inflammatory conditions on the outer portion of the human being, we get skin eruptions and the like. If we now look hack again to our plant, to the betula alba, we find the opposing process in the disposition of the potassium salts in the birch bark: we thus become able to see how we can fight against the process of skin eruption, which is an excessive function of exudation within the human being, by preparing a remedy from the birch bark.

We are therefore able to study how plant processes, how mineral processes, are active, and we grasp the connections between what is outside in nature and what is active within the human being. In other words, medical empiricism, therapeutic empiricism, ascends to what Goethe calls in his sense—not now in the intellectual sense but in his sense the rational stage of science. We arrive at a science as therapy, which is able really to penetrate into the connections.

These things are not so simple, for one must study things in detail, at least in accordance with certain types, at first in accordance with secret types of the human personality and in accordance with secrets of natural existence. It should not be assumed that if the process has been studied in an example such as the betula alba, an overview has already been reached of what needs to be considered. In each different plant-forming process—for example in the horse chestnut or whatever—these formative processes will manifest themselves in an essentially different way. What has been indicated here should not in any way lead to a generalized twaddle but to a very serious and extensive study.

Now I wish to direct my words particularly to the students here. If this study is undertaken in a rational way, it need not drive you into a panic regarding the extent of study necessary, for if everything now present as examination-ballast falls away—to speak in Paracelsus' terms—and is replaced by something active, leading in this way to a rational view of a therapeutic pathology and a pathological therapy, students will have to study not more but less. And because this study will permeate you with life, it will bring forth a much greater enthusiasm than what leads you to the human being today, yielding only the ability to see organs. Such organs are by no means at rest and can be understood only if they are grasped in their living function and in their interaction with other organs, can be understood only if this organization is studied and if one strives to enter completely into the functional element. We need an outer natural science that is also striving to reach the functional element.

It is absolutely necessary to study in parallel the inner process in the human being, that peculiar process taking place as poisoning and poisoning effects that have fallen out of balance, and those processes that take place in the natural order. And because the outer relates itself in a polar way to the inner, the outer processes must be used in a certain way polarically. By this means we can be guided into pathology, or, said better, into a therapeutic pathology and a pathological therapy.

I have only been able to suggest here what is necessary to direct the steps needed to heal medical study, and was only able to suggest how spiritual science wishes to work into this medical study. This evening I will give you a few more examples, to show you how intuitively looking together at the outer workings of nature and the workings of the inner organism can lead to therapy and to knowledge of pathology. At that time I would like to go into particular substances.

During the brief time available to me here, I have only been able to indicate the principle, as it were, concerning the example of betula alba, and this evening I will give some further indications, but in every instance I will try to hold myself to indicating only what can add to a general understanding of the human being. Proceeding from this, the physician must move into further specialization. He must enter into the specifics. To deal with specifics always requires an individual evaluation, and here it is only necessary, out of the laymen's understanding of medical directions, of medical principles, for an understanding to grow of what the physician has to undertake within the outer world.

If you consider rightly the course that an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wishes to pursue in medicine—and I will speak more about this tonight—you will really be able to say that this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not wish to encourage quackery and dilettantism; rather it wishes above all to work toward a healing of science, toward a true, serious science that will itself engender social effects.

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Note 1:

Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Science and Medicine, twenty lectures given to physicians in Dornach, 1920. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1975.

Note 2:

In German, the illnesses, are called Geisteskrankheiten, diseases of the spirit as opposed to those of the body. As Steiner is speaking here of the role of the spirit in bodily-phenomena, it may be helpful to keep in mind the thought of spiritual illnesses, though in the translation we have chosen the more commonly used English equivalent, mental illnesses.

Note 3:

Rudolf Steiner, Von Seelenraetseln, 1917. Excerpts of this are published in English under the title, The Case for Anthroposophy. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1970.

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Tonight I would like to add a few things to the lectures I have been giving to you in these past few days as a substitute for the scheduled lecturer. I would like to point aphoristically, as it were, to something that may still be able to clarify a principle for the fructification of medical-therapeutic study through spiritual science. Obviously for the reasons already mentioned this morning, I cannot speak too much detail here; that is due not so much to the shortness of time—that too, naturally—but more to the fact that detailed knowledge must be held for a really professional gathering of physicians, again for the reasons I presented this morning.

Nevertheless, I would still like to contribute something in this direction, something that can lead to a general understanding of the nature of medicine so that a kind of social influence can emanate from a spiritual scientific study of medicine, bringing about a certain trust between the public and physicians. The better our understanding of the nature of medicine, the more effectively will medicine be able to work.

This morning I directed your attention to the fact that the life of the human organism consists of the nerve-sense system—the head system—working oppositely to the metabolic-limb system; these two are then balanced by the rhythmic system. All breakdown processes, the completely necessary breakdown processes of the nerve-sense system, are continuously brought into harmony and exchange with the upbuilding processes of the metabolic-limb system. You can imagine (and this can be verified in detail) that because the two systems of the human organism work in a thoroughly opposite way, they also work upon one another. Thus what goes on in the details of the metabolic-limb system, for example, should not be influenced too strongly from the head system, bypassing the rhythmic system; when this happens an activity suitable only to the head system works its way into the metabolic limb system.

If we adequately penetrate what we are concerned with here, we will come to understand how such intrusions of one system upon the other can take place. It will be understood, in other words, how the head system, the nerve-sense system (in which there must also be metabolic processes, as I have explained to you), can occasionally be overcome by metabolic processes that make the head system resemble the metabolic-limb system inwardly and functionally. The reverse can also take place, because the same functional system that is normally active in the head is also active in the metabolic-limb system, though in a subordinate way Occasionally this activity can get the upper hand, can become too intense in the metabolic-limb system, where it should only reach a certain level, having its actual significance in the head.

This is possible, in other words, because the nerve-sense activity that is also present in the metabolic-limb system strongly impregnates the metabolic-limb system with head activity, which thus becomes predominant in the abdomen, for example. Said in a better way, it becomes an activity whose intensity is too great. Then what should normally take place as breakdown processes only in the nerve-sense system will take place in the abdominal organs. Of course it will take on another form in the abdominal system, but it will nevertheless cause mischief there. In fact, by looking in this way into the organization of human nature, we can see in the phenomenon I have just described the development of a serious human illness, namely, typhus abdominalis. The manifestations of typhus may certainly be studied empirically, but they can be understood and placed within the entire human organization only if one is able to penetrate the human being in this way from the standpoint of a rational medicine, if I may use this Goethean designation.

I have also shown you this morning how it is possible to make the transition from the physiological-pathological to the therapeutic by attempting not only to penetrate what goes on in human nature but at the same time to penetrate what goes on in outer nature. Processes take place in outer nature which, if penetrated in the right way, can be introduced into the human organism by administering the appropriate substances. Because outer nature—the plant nature, for example—works in a certain way by virtue of its striving upward, working in an opposite sense to what strives downward in the human being, substances from plants can restrain certain processes that are unfolding improperly among the three systems of the human organism.

It is interesting to explore how what I presented to you this morning about the plant world and its connection with the human being can be penetrated in a similar way in relation to the mineral world. In order to penetrate this matter in relation to the mineral world, however, we must first gain certain anthroposophical understandings of the human being.

The soul-spiritual, the etheric, and the physical are all active in the human being. As we will have been able to discern through the considerations in these lectures, this soul-spiritual element works in such a way that it can be penetrated by full ego-consciousness. If this is the case, the human being is organized in the normal way, as it were. On the other hand, the ego-consciousness may be weakened, may step back in some way. If the soul-spiritual element kicks up some kind of fuss, going its own way without being penetrated in the right way by the ego, then various types of the so-called mental illnesses arise.

Everything that is soul-spiritual in the human being, however, as well as what in anthroposophical terminology is called the astral—that is, the more subconscious, dreamlike, or entirely unconscious soul life—and also what is understood as ego-activity, as the fully conscious soul life, has its physical carrier by means of which it works in a certain way in physical life. We may therefore say that if we study the human being we must direct our gaze not merely to what expresses itself as ego-activity, which is a purely spiritual activity we must rather direct our gaze to the actual, carrier of this ego-activity in the organism. We find that the actual carrier of this ego-activity is essentially anchored in the blood.

I could certainly demonstrate to you in detail how, especially through the particular activity of the blood, through the working together of the metabolic activity in the blood with the rhythmic activity in the blood, the ego works with the rest of the soul element, but to go into this now would lead too far. What should interest us more right now, however, is the bridge from physiology and pathology to therapy. There we find something exceptionally important. We can influence the physical scaffolding, as it were—the physical carrier—of a soul-spiritual element, of the fully conscious ego, let us say, through certain processes that we bring about in it. The physical carrier then withdraws from the ego-activity, as it were, yet continues to perform a function similar to what otherwise takes place only under the influence of the ego-activity.

Drawing 1

Let me refer to a specific case in this connection. Imagine, please—I will sketch this for you—that what is active as ego-activity builds up, through the human blood system, something like a scaffolding, a scaffolding of forces. I will designate the ego-activity itself by these colored lines next to the line of this force-scaffolding, the line that designates the soul-spiritual element of the ego-activity (see drawing, red). If one can now influence the force-organization lying at the basis of the ego-activity in a certain way, it could be possible for this force-organization to become independent, as it were, to tear itself away and as physical activity, as scaffolding of physical force-activity, to separate itself from the soul-spiritual and yet remain like an image of the soul-spiritual activity, though working merely physically. In a certain way we thus incorporate into ourselves a kind of double that works deeply in the subconscious but that work; similarly—though only in space, which means only physically—to the way it normally works when surrendering itself as an unencumbered instrument for the ego-activity.

This can be brought about by introducing too much phosphorus into the human being, by administering to someone a powerful dose of phosphorus. (This does not actually need to be done; in elementary cases one can already see this. It is always possible to find the point designated by Goethe as the one behind which nature reveals its manifest secret, if one follows the appropriate path.) It is possible to separate out the bodily carrier of this ego-activity from the ego-activity itself. Then this ego-activity is carried out in the body as in an image. What would be the result of this? The result would be that, particularly under the influence of the phosphorus forces, the blood activity would proliferate beyond its normal extent, particularly in the bony system. In the bony system a kind of hyperemia would arise. In this way, through this hyperemia, an excessive blood activity in the region of the bone cartilage would run rampant, and the calcification process of the bones would be opposed.

I have described to you what could result from treating someone with too much phosphorus, where the function that phosphorus is normally able to fulfill in the human organism is excessively enhanced. Those forces that are outside in the world, however, anchored in the different minerals, are present in the human being in another form, as it were, in a super-sensible form, and they can be active within the human being. Man is a microcosm in a certain respect. If these forces that are normally anchored in phosphorus outside in nature are active within the human being, as can occur particularly in early childhood, then the illness rickets occurs. By penetrating the connection of the human being with the surrounding world, we have been able to ascertain that the manifestation of rickets in the human organism is a process similar to the one that takes place outside in nature in the manifestation of phosphorus. I am speaking to you aphoristically and obviously in a way in which not all the parts of a sequence of proof are connected; by means of a specific case, which is actually only indicating the direction, we can see how to search in a spiritual scientific way for this connection between the human being and the rest of the world.

Drawing 2

Now, however, it is possible to proceed further. I have shown you earlier today how, with the metabolic-limb system on one side and the nerve-sense system on the other side, the balancing rhythmic system in between, these two systems work together in a way (see drawing). You see, in fact, that what serves as an irregularity in the metabolic-limb system, bringing about illness, is just what induces health in the head system. Thus in the human head system there are always certain functions that stem from phosphorus, though from a very slight quantity of phosphorus that is found in the human brain. We have already become acquainted with this phosphorus-activity from the other side, in the way I have described to you, as something that brings the proper breakdown in the calcification processes in the metabolic-limb organism. These phosphorus processes in the brain, however, must be present wherever there is to be breakdown and where, above all, this breakdown is to be continually active. In other words, because the phosphorus process is present in the brain, we continuously have a kind of manifestation of rickets in the brain in, you could say, a status nascendi.

This is precisely the basis of our brain-activity, that bone continuously wants to be formed, but this bone formation is continuously inhibited once the skull has developed to surround the human brain in the right way. In the human brain—and this reveals itself to human perception—we have a continuous striving toward bone formation, but this bone formation reaches its conclusion at a certain age, at which time this activity of bone formation ceases. We thus have here something that is really conducive to illness but that is balanced from the other side, from the other pole of the organism; we have here a continuous striving toward rickets.

It is interesting that a rhythm such as this one that can be observed in the human being is also present outside in the rest of nature, though appearing in a certain respect as the opposite. If we look at the remarkable significance of phosphorus for the human brain, we have to say to ourselves that as phosphorus is taken in it is worked through up to the head. It undergoes a transformation within the human organism itself. It follows the same direction as the growth in the human being. It incorporates itself into this direction of growth in the human being, thus reducing its own activity to a minimum, as it were, diluting it. By means of this dilution the restrained rickets of the head can become the carrier of just those soul-spiritual processes that must be undertaken by means of the human head's mediation.

It is interesting that if very small doses of phosphorus are administered to the human being in the right way, rather than the somewhat larger, ordinarily perceptible doses of phosphorus, something different is achieved even in the function of phosphorus. If these small doses are administered to the human organism, they work in the same way as phosphorus works in the human brain. They now work in the rest of the organism as small doses able to restrain the rickets process if it has begun in children. Phosphorus in small quantities, in the smallest doses, can therefore serve as a remedy against rickets. In a more comprehensive sense, phosphorus can generally be used as a remedy against everything in which this ego-scaffolding, the physical ego-scaffolding (see Drawing 1, white), which I have sketched under the red, is freed within the organism, as a result of illness, from the actual soul activity: in other words, phosphorus brings back the soul activity, returning the condition to normal.

I would have to present a very complicated exposition about human nature for you to be able to see what actually lies at the basis of the dispute between allopathy and homoeopathy. In certain areas, however, you could say that what homoeopathy reveals becomes perfectly evident, as in these cases I have indicated to you. With certain small doses of phosphorus, or also sulphur (in short, something combustible—I will return to this) rickets as well as other inflammatory conditions can be healed, illnesses that stem from a blood-activity that has been freed from the ego-being.

You see, then, that when we begin to study the human being as suggested by spiritual science, as in this case, the connection of the human being with outer, inorganic nature becomes transparent. What I have just touched on here today can definitely be extended to other inorganic substances. One need only pursue this in detail. It is precisely this attempt to bring about a union of pathology, physiology, and therapy that requires a devoted study of the world within and the world outside of the human being. We may call phosphorus and sulphur combustible substances. If this study is really extended further, combustible substances reveal themselves as working in a way thoroughly akin to what has been described of phosphorus. They work so as to re-insert the emancipated ego-scaffolding into the ego-activity.

Certain salts work in the opposite way, substances now that are not combustible but that dissolve in water and then precipitate out again when the water is cooled. These salts, carbonates and other salts, work in such a way that they call forth a too-intense union of the soul-spiritual, particularly the ego-activity, with the scaffolding; they do not loosen it from the scaffolding but rather impress the soul-spiritual too strongly into it. They can therefore be used as remedies if this connection is for some reason too loose.

We can therefore say that if we understand the actual results of introducing a substance into the organism, how it influences the entire organization, then we can see how to work against a process that is proceeding abnormally and must be countered.

For certain processes, for example the process lying at the basis of pulmonary tuberculosis, it is precisely such salt-like substances (therefore soluble substances) that are particularly effective. What pulmonary tuberculosis is demanding is something to work against a process which, in the human organism, is the opposite of what takes place when a salt dissolves into a solution. What is important here is that broadening one's knowledge about all of human nature leads into the human being's connection with all his outer, worldly environment.

In these thoroughly aphoristic considerations I can only offer examples. What I have just been speaking about could be illustrated by still other examples. We can find such examples everywhere, but let us take an example from a realm that can at the same time lead us into the whole connection of the soul-spiritual with the physical. What is transmitted through the nerve-sense system in human life constitutes the conscious life of the human being from waking to falling asleep. We are thus able to say, more or less, that the head system is the expression for the conscious life of the human being. The metabolic-limb system is not the expression for the conscious life of the human being in the same way. We go through the world with conscious head but with unconscious limbs. These limbs become conscious only when they are touched in some way, when they endure an insult of some sort. We may therefore say that the normal condition for the head system, for the nerve-sense system, is waking consciousness, whereas for the opposite system in the human being it is unconsciousness. It is possible, however, to produce artificially in the human being a kind of consciousness for this other system, for the metabolic-limb system. This happens through massage, for example, which consists of making conscious through outer measures what otherwise remains unconscious. What is important here is that through massage an improvement can be brought about of an inadequate connection between the soul-spiritual and the physical. Take the case of a person who has a tendency to illness because his soul-spiritual element is insufficiently inclined to penetrate his metabolic-limb system. Then the physical aspect of this metabolic-limb system can be supported by massaging it, by lifting it, to a certain degree, from the condition of the spiritual into the condition of consciousness; the effectiveness of the system is thus supported, thereby calling forth a stronger permeation of this system by the soul-spiritual.

If it is understood how this metabolic-limb system works, if it is known, for example, that what pulses in the arms and hands, what pulses there as the soul-spiritual element, continues inwardly and rules the inner metabolism of the human being, then it will also be known what it means to bring about a partial consciousness in the arms and hands through massage. It means that the soul-spiritual element in the metabolic system is enhanced—the metabolic system that works within the human being in a constructive way, bringing about digestion, the taking up of substance.

If one finds, therefore, that a person is suffering inwardly and organically from metabolic disturbances, metabolic disturbances that are responsible for the inability of his nourishment to integrate itself properly in the body or for the results of this nourishment to proceed further into the upbuilding processes, if one finds, therefore, that the metabolism that proceeds inward is not working properly, then it is possible in certain cases to be of some help with arm and hand massage (of course detailed knowledge is necessary to carry this out in the right way). Such assistance consists of supporting the soul-spiritual element in its activity through the degree of consciousness brought about by means of the massage.

If the legs and feet are massaged, something else occurs. The soul-spiritual element that permeates the legs and feet is connected organically with processes of elimination, with breakdown processes. One will be able to offer assistance with a massage of the legs and feet, therefore, if the digestion in the direction of the process of elimination is not being accomplished in the right way.

You can see that if the nature of medicine is illuminated in this way by spiritual science, such insights can be arrived at not simply by chance in an empirical way, should they happen to present themselves empirically; rather it becomes possible to work fully consciously to cultivate the connections among physiology, pathology, and therapy in the most varied domains. I am saying these things to you, as I have mentioned previously, only to illuminate the directions one must pursue here. I know very well how astonishing such things appear because it is not possible, of course, to bring together all the details here.

If we consider an illness like diabetes mellitus, for example, which presents doctors with so many concerns, we must again look to the connection of the soul-spiritual element and particularly the conscious soul-spiritual element, that element permeated with the ego—with the physical carrier of this ego-activity. Something different now takes place from what was described in the first case today. Let us assume that this ego-activity becomes too great within the human organism. It extends itself beyond its proper measure. Then abnormal processes of elimination take place like those we find in the diabetic. In this case we are dealing with an excessive ego-activity in the organic itself, with an excessively deep immersion of the ego into the organic, so that through this deep immersion something is driven outward in a way that manifests particularly in the diabetic.

Let us now shift our gaze again away from what goes on within the human being and direct it to what goes on in the world outside the human being. In this world outside we have plants. This morning we already became aware of how plants in a certain way develop a process from below upward, a process that develops in the human being from above downward. What takes place in diabetes as the hypertrophy of ego-activity in the organism actually proceeds in the direction opposite to that of plant growth. If we are able to discern the right function in the growing plant, then under certain circumstances we can establish a relationship between what works downward in the diabetic and upward in the plant. We must conceive of the plant in such a way, however, that we say: the plant is a being; it is also physical; it grows, it reproduces, and therefore it has an etheric body. For spiritual perception it also has an etheric body, but it does not bring it to the point of inner soul movement; therefore it has no astral body, and also no ego-activity. Nevertheless it grows toward the ego-activity, the astral activity. The same thing that the plant unfolds from below upward the human being unfolds from above downward.

If we understand that we must observe what actually goes on in the plant, seeing how it grows in the opposite direction to which the human being develops his ego, from above downward, then we find how something arises in the plant element that is able to have an inner relationship to this inner ego-activity through the fact that it also has something to do with combustibility. Earlier I drew your attention to combustible substances. Now we see a combustible, volatile substantiality, a substantiality approaching combustion that develops out of the plant in the etheric oils. If we see the etheric oils appearing in certain plants, then we can discover in a study such as the one I have been suggesting, that this formation of etheric oils is the opposite of the activity enacted by the ego-activity pressing itself into the human organism through which a person becomes diabetic. If what is present in the outer world as the opposite is introduced into the human being in the right way, it is then possible to work against diabetes mellitus.

In this case this must be done by adding these etheric oils to baths, for example, or adding the plants themselves from which these oils are developed, allowing the diabetic to bathe in them. In this way the forces that the plant unfolds in the etheric oils work from outside inward against the forces that bring about diabetes. We will be able to help the person afflicted with this illness particularly by means of such baths.

I am only introducing a few individual examples here out of the rich wealth of examples that could be presented: I offered a large number of them this spring in the course for physicians (see Note 1). I am introducing them here only to illustrate the principles involved, but you can see from these examples how medicine can gradually become rational. These are examples through which one really comes to see the process taking place within the human being and the process in outer nature; one comes to see how these two processes either support each other or work against each other and therefore how a process in the human organism can be restrained, how one can work toward healing. If we extend this way of studying into knowledge of the physical human being and its connections with the soul-spiritual human being, we will progress further and further.

You know that in modern medicine, according to the natural scientific view, the problem of heredity plays a tremendous role. This problem, however, is treated in a thoroughly abstract and external way. Through outer science it is possible to make very few connections with what is actually active in human nature. Now I would like to present something to you that can only be arrived at out of a rich anthroposophical investigation. I will present it to you as a result of such an investigation: the human being is, in fact, formed out of the whole rest of the world, which belongs to him as the earthly world and also as the extraterrestrial world. He is formed out of this in various ways. We find, for example, that the female organism is formed out of nature, out of the cosmos, in such a way that there is a predominance in the female organism of those forces that are less bound to the forces of the earth, as it were. In the female organism there is something strongly extraterrestrial. In the male organism forces are primarily developed that are connected with earthly life. In ordinary life this does not come so strongly into consideration, but it must be considered in reproduction. In reproduction what matters is that the forces active in the female organism and contributing to reproduction are actually the transference of what inserts itself as the extraterrestrial element into general human nature. What draws the human being down into the earthly world, however, is inserted into the male organism.

Now let us consider what is actually present in the human being through his earthly environment. The most noticeable thing in man through his earthly environment is the ego-activity. This ego-activity gives the earthly evolution of the human being its full meaning. We must evolve ourselves from other worlds into the earthly world in order to be able to develop the ego-activity fully in our soul-spiritual element. I have already indicated to you how this ego-activity is bound to the scaffolding of forces mediated by the blood. We must therefore say that what is primarily inserted into the blood, working in accordance with the ego-activity, is brought about by the male personality by way of reproduction. What inserts the extraterrestrial into the human being, which must first be penetrated by the ego-activity, stems more from the female side.

Thus we see male and female working together in this way in reproduction, and only through having insight into this are we able to gain correct concepts of heredity. To begin with, the female seed, the female germ, is touched by the male influence, and this female germ has a certain independence in the female organism. We must say that if we have before us a mature female organism, this extraterrestrial aspect works primarily in the rest of the female organism; in the part of the female organism giving rise to the formation of the germ, it is not active, particularly not after conception. Particularly the female germ that has undergone conception has a certain independence so that what it signifies as a transmitter of the ego-activity is transferred independently onto the descendants in a certain way.

If these things are known, they can be applied so that phenomena confronting us in the outer world illustrate what was first gained through spiritual vision. Through spiritual vision it becomes clear that something extraterrestrial is, in fact, anchored in the female organism and that the earthly, which adheres particularly to the blood-activity, is transmitted through the male organism. It becomes evident that through this transmittal the female ovum gains a certain independence, developing separately, as it were, from the rest of the extraterrestrial female organism by means of the fertilization.

A process such as this, which one comes to know soul-spiritually, can then stand in the background when one wishes to explain a remarkable phenomenon such as hemophilia. The curious fact emerges with this illness that there are people who suffer from an inadequate coagulation of the blood, so that the least injury—often even without a verifiable injury—causes them to lose a great deal of blood, tending toward hemorrhage. This illness has a most unusual characteristic: males originating from hemophiliac families do not manifest the symptoms if they are borne by women from non-hemophiliac families; women from hemophiliac families, on the other hand, do not get hemophilia through heredity, but if they have children, the males to whom they give birth will contract hemophilia. This means that hemophilia passes through the woman. This points us to the independence of the germ, about which I have just spoken. It points us to the outer phenomenon that can illustrate what we came to know through spiritual vision.

I have presented something to you in a narrative way which may be recounted as follows. I have shown you how on the one hand it is possible to look into the being of man through spiritual vision, into the concrete being of man, into his upbuilding and breakdown processes, into his processes of health and disease, which are actually in a continuous interaction and between which a balance must be sought. On the other hand, I have shown you how, through spiritual vision, it is possible to find the reciprocal relationship of the human being to his environment and thereby to build a bridge from physiology and pathology to therapy. Finally I wanted to show you with a specific example (I have selected an extreme case, hemophilia and the hereditary conditions connected with it) how, if one looks in the right way at nature in the cases where nature reveals her manifest secret, it is possible everywhere to receive an illustration of what was first known by spiritual scientific means. The objection often raised in this regard therefore has no validity; this objection is that a person who cannot yet see into the spiritual world has no way of finding any proof for what spiritual science maintains. This is not the case. What is important is on the one hand to be able to receive the results of spiritual science without dogmatism and belief in authority, and on the other hand to receive them without previously acquired, prejudiced skepticism. One simply receives them. One doesn't say, “I believe them,” nor does one rashly refuse them; rather one takes them and verifies them in relation to outer reality.

When you apply what may initially appear paradoxical to you, even incredible, drawn down as it is from the spiritual world through super-sensible vision in spiritual investigation, you will see that if you apply it in life, if you ask life, it will be confirmed in the points that matter. You will receive empirical confirmation everywhere for what spiritual investigation discovers. People today who refuse knowledge of the spiritual world with the excuse that they themselves are not able to see into the spiritual world are like the person who sees a shaped piece of iron (this was sketched) and says, “I will shoe my horse with that, for it is a horseshoe.” If one were to say to him, “It would be a mistake to shoe a horse with it, because it is a magnet, it has magnetic forces,” he would reply, “I don't see any magnetic forces—to me it is a horseshoe.” The spiritual is in everything material, and we are living in an age in which this spiritual element must be sought. A person who wishes to investigate matter, who wishes to ask questions without seeking the spirit, is like the one who uses the magnet to shoe his horse, who therefore does not really know how things in the material world are to be used.

Though what I have presented to you today had to be full of gaps and aphoristic in nature, I simply wished to indicate the direction in which medical studies must proceed in the future, for these medical studies are so intimately connected with the social question. Just as the human world can be healed socially only if spiritual knowledge is carried into social judgments, so our medicine can bring health only if spiritual vision is carried into it.

We are not dream-spinners in any realm. We do not by any means want dilettantes in any realm. What is important is serious research, research that has developed the fundamental principle often applied today. If a hypothesis is dangled here or there, it is said that it is merely a comfortable tool fur the grasping of phenomena. Even in mathematics the point has been reached of hatching such hypotheses or directions of thought. Spiritual science is firmly rooted in the principle that nothing should be avoided that may be necessary for the progress of human life, that nothing should he avoided in applying forces in the direction of what is required for this. From the course of human evolution it is clearly perceptible today that the signs of the time are saying to us: it is no longer possible to progress in the old tracks.

What we have here in Dornach has only been able to develop because it is no longer possible to progress in the old tracks; new guidelines are to be sought for here. We are specialized enough. What is important now is to bring together the individual specialties again. Perhaps you will see from this course that the spiritual forces that will bring together these individual specialties must flow from a center. In order to do this, however, one must depart from those comfortable paths that are so frequently sought today. The fruits will lie above all in the direction of the progress of humanity. For this reason, I would have especially liked it if everything that has been said here out of spiritual science could have been said also by specialists. Therefore I was not so pleased at having to substitute for you in an important area; this is how things happened, however, and nothing else could have been done, so we must simply accept what happened.

Most important, however, whether a specialist or a general observer were to present what is necessary here, would be to show that even in this difficult area of medicine progress is possible only through fructification by spiritual investigation. This would have been revealed more clearly if someone could have stepped forward in this area who could speak both out of the tradition of the time, out of everything that the time itself is able to offer medicine, and out of an open sense for spiritual science. Such an individual could have shown that it is possible to stand at the pinnacle of contemporary medical science, of official medical science, and still to be such a good spiritual scientist that he can only believe, can only bear this medicine if it can be illuminated by spiritual science. Whether this became sufficiently evident to you, despite the fact that I had to replace the specialists in medicine, I do not know, but I do hope that there will be other occasions to show, in a way illuminated by outer circumstances, that medicine can work into the future only if the spirit penetrates it, as is intended or at least as is striven for here in this Goetheanum: only if the Goethean spirit is absorbed into medicine.

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Note 1:

Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Science and Medicine, twenty lectures given to physicians in Dornach, 1920. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1975.

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The wishes that are to be considered first have already been expressed by you, and we will begin today by addressing some of them. I hope that everything can be covered in the three hours that we have available. In these few introductory remarks, I would like to speak about these matters as they arise out of anthroposophy. We do not want to consider how these things are currently being discussed in other fields, but rather we want to address the issues as they arise out of anthroposophy, especially in relation to the wishes that have been expressed.

The first question that has been raised, and with which many others can also be dealt with at the same time, at least in principle, is the question of the diseases of the luetic type. The diseases of the luetic type, which we have so far discussed only briefly, are those which, firstly, must be carefully distinguished from all kinds of secondary symptoms, neighboring symptoms, and so on, and which actually indicate to the most intense degree how the organism behaves in general in a diseased state. The reason why the symptoms of tuberculosis are such an important medical and therapeutic issue is that for them, quite unequivocally – let us speak without prejudice, you will see that we do not want to stop at prejudice – a specific remedy is available in the mercury cure. But a consideration of the mercury cure will show us how to deal with the evil that lies therein in a more appropriate way.

Every illness is fundamentally based on the fact that the three systems of the human organism – the nervous-sensory system, the rhythmic system and the metabolic-limb system – are not working together harmoniously. You only have to consider what this harmonious interaction is based on. In the metabolism-limb system, we have an activity of the human organism that takes place with the preferential involvement of the etheric body. But the other parts of the human organism also play a role in each system. So one cannot say, for example, that in the metabolism-limb system the two parts of the human organism, the physical organism and the etheric organism, work together, but rather that the two mainly work together. The other two, the astral body and the ego organization, also play a role. For example, in the main organization, that is, in the entire nerve-sense organization, we have the ego organization and the astral organization playing the main role, with the etheric and physical organizations playing a subordinate role. Above all, we must realize that the difference between the waking state and the sleeping state is that during sleep, the activities that emanate from the astral organism and the ego organism and are directly effected during the waking state continue, so to speak, through a kind of persistence of the organism. In the sleeping state, these activities resonate without the astral body and ego organization being present. Can you understand that? They continue, just as when I push a ball and the ball still runs away even when I stop pushing, so the activities of the astral body and the ego organization continue during sleep. Therefore, one should not say that if something is derived from the ego organization or the astral organization, it could not therefore be there during sleep. Sleep must only cease when there is danger that the astral or ego after-effects will cease. At that moment, sleep must in turn cease and wakefulness must occur.

These things cannot be taken in the same schematic way as they sometimes have to be presented in anthroposophy for the sake of laypeople's understanding.

What is really important now is to present the facts correctly. All these questions about causes should not really relate to the internal organization of the organism, but rather only to the external causes of the matter. These should always be known. The diagnosis should always be made up of a complete history of the disease. But speculating about causes within the organism does not actually lead to finding the right remedy.

If I now ask the question with this in mind, I have to say: what is it that is present in the case of syphilis itself? Let us therefore separate syphilis from all the other possible sexually transmitted diseases, from all gonorrheal diseases, from all chancre symptoms and so on, in other words, from all the things that basically — we will deal with this separately — do not belong to the actual syphilis, but are basically a different disease. The actual syphilitic disease is essentially based on the fact that the human ego organization is overburdened for the metabolic limb system, preferably for the metabolic system. In a sense, the human ego organization slides down into the abdomen. And all the symptoms that occur stem from the fact that the ego organization slides too far down into the abdomen. This is precisely how the processes arise that are expressed through the symptoms you are familiar with, those processes that cause the ego organization to predominate over the etheric organization, which is not supposed to be present in this part of the human organism. There is simply too strong an ego organization in the sexual tract. That is the fact. We must first look at this fact, rather than at the infection and so on; we must look at this fact, because it is there. And the cure must actually start from this fact.

Now let us consider the effect of mercury therapy on this condition. What actually occurs in the human organism with every mercury treatment? Mercury treatment, as you know, is a very old treatment, and it is sometimes extraordinarily beneficial, not only for luetic patients but also for others. But what happens during mercury treatment?

Mercury is one of those remedies that was actually found to be beneficial in times when medicine was based on a certain instinctive knowledge of the human organism. But what actually cures when one has to have a mercury treatment for syphilis? It cures exactly as much as one introduces into the blood in the correct dosage of the mercury preparation. It cures exactly as much. Now think about what the consequences of this are. Firstly, as far as I know, it is not common practice to inject mercury into syphilitic diseases. In recent years, however, this has become the norm because, as we shall hear in a moment, the earlier smear cures are no longer effective, or are too strong; but on the whole, this partial transition has also been brought about empirically because it was seen that there is something about the smear cure that leads to disaster.

And what is the case here? When you use the smearing cure, it basically leads to a partial, even general infection. It is calculated on the whole to enter the blood circulation. That is what it is calculated on. But when you use the smearing cure, there are other channels for the mercury impulse in the human organism. What is healing is essentially that which enters the blood; while that which does not enter the blood but comes through etheric channels is carried along in etheric channels that, for example, run along the nervous system, along the nerve cords, and this is all bad. All this spreads, so to speak, the ego organization throughout the whole organism, and you basically just get the evil spread throughout the whole organism in a different form, which, after years of internal preparatory processes, causes you to suffer from all those symptoms that occur as a result of the mercury cure.

Therefore, it can be said that the healing effect of mercury is already evident in the treatment of syphilitic diseases with mercury. What is the reason for this? We can really say, in very general terms, what the factors involved are, as I said in my general lecture yesterday. From a certain moment onwards, organic substances are no longer influenced by terrestrial forces, but by the cosmic forces that act peripherally from the periphery to the center of the earth. And from a certain moment on, everything that we get into our organism through ordinary digestion is also under the influence of cosmic forces, cosmic rounding-off forces, right cosmic rounding-off forces, when it has passed through the intestines.

Now, the ego organization primarily lives in these cosmic rounding-off forces. If it interferes too strongly with the metabolic system, then there is simply a tendency for the ego organization to atomize, to round off and organize individual links in the human organism instead of organizing the whole body according to its shape. And all the phenomena of syphilis, all the symptoms of syphilis, are the result of this partial atomization, this atomistic organization. Thus the ego organization intervenes in very small systems of the human organism, while these small systems should reserve themselves for the organization of their own etheric body, which alone, not by the detour of the ego organization, is subject to the cosmic-peripheral forces.

Now, mercury has the peculiarity that, when introduced into the human organism, it is the substance that most strongly and most intensely mimics the outer form of the cosmos in earthly terms. The moment the mercury is introduced directly into the blood circulation by injection, the tendency arises for the mercury to give up this partial organization, this small atomistic organization, and the ego organization is released again, acting through the whole organism and is thereby able to restore the state of health by reaction.

But all this depends on the patient never taking in more mercury than is absolutely necessary. This is a problem that can never really be solved. Because you must never expose yourself to the danger of giving just a little too much mercury during the mercury cure. You have to give exactly as much as can be absorbed into the circulation according to the respective medical condition, because everything else remains behind as a residuum and causes precisely those sequelae that then occur and that you know.

Therefore, when using mercury therapy, it will always turn out that one cures, but that the patient may have to pay for the cure quite heavily with the terrible consequences, which then also look syphilis-like, but which actually have to destroy the organism little by little and irrevocably. It is precisely the certainty of healing that mercury provides that shows how problematic its use is.

It was not always problematic. You see, not exactly for syphilis, but for many other diseases, mercury was always used, we may talk about it in the next few days. Mercury did indeed evoke a very specific emotional response in the highly instinctive patient. The patient knew when he had had enough. He was saturated with mercury. Today, of course, the instincts have degenerated. The patient can no longer provide a yardstick for what happens to him through the mercury. He no longer gets enough of the mercury, he becomes oversaturated. That is what usually happens today: The patient becomes oversaturated with mercury, and then the well-known consequences occur in a very devastating way, so that just as one can clearly see the effect of sulfur and phosphorus in the organism, and just as one can clearly see what happens in the organism when salt dissolves, so one can clearly see what happens in the organism when mercury is taken, but one must always pay close attention to the dosage. We know the basis for the effect of mercury.

Now the question is whether it would be possible to carry out such a treatment that would be harmless even if too much was dosed, because simply an excretion would occur if the dosage was too high. Mercury has the peculiarity of not being excreted outwards if too much is administered to the body, but of being excreted inwards. In this respect, it was extremely important to me in my younger years how Hyrtl simply took the bones from people who had been treated with mercury, and then smashed them open at autopsy, and how one could then find the small mercury droplets in the bones under the microscope. So the whole bone system had been contaminated with mercury. That is the peculiar thing about mercury: it is not excreted outwards, but the organism takes it up, and the whole ego organization of someone treated for mercury has to constantly deal with the organization of these tiny mercury droplets, mercury atoms, which are everywhere in the organism, especially in the calcareous parts.

And so we can already say: We must try to find something in nature that, when applied like mercury, is absorbed by the organism and replaces the ego organization in the organism, thus relieving and freeing it. But if too much of it is taken in, which is unavoidable, then it must be excreted not inwardly but outwardly, like anything else that is digested.

It is therefore important to come up with something that corresponds to the ego organization in the external nature and that can be prepared in such a way that it actually enters the blood circulation and, so to speak, creates a phantom of the ego organization in the blood circulation. It is necessary to introduce an artificial ego into the blood circulation.

And our doctors in particular should carry out the appropriate experiments, and without doubt you will see that you will get results that will certainly be surprising.

Take what you can gain from those parts of the plant that have become extremely hardened, that have thus transferred the root process of the plant to the rest of the plant. In the root process of the plant lies an extraordinarily strong imitation of the ego organization. The flower of the plant is of etheric organization. In what is below the flower, the plant plays around the astral organization; where the plant is rooted in the soil, the I-organization intervenes. In every strongly lignified root, which is still attached to the plant, which has not yet passed over into the inorganic because it has been separated from the living plant, we have impulses of the I-organization.

Now, however, if one were to take plant roots directly and extract substances from them to inject, one would hardly be able to cope for the reason that although the root of the plant contains the I-organization very strongly, it is, so to speak, a phantom of the I-organization, but what lives in it as impulses is limited to the nerve sense system and does not have a strong effect down into the rest of the organization. Therefore, one can say: If you only take hold of the root organization at the root, then you will hardly be able to form a preparation suitable for the purpose mentioned. On the other hand, there are plants in which the root organization has a strong effect on the whole plant. And one such plant, in which the root organization actually penetrates the whole plant right up to the fruit, is Astragalus exscapus, the tragacanth root, which is also known as wolfberry. It has fruits that look like pods, but they are as hard as stone and inside them are grains. I am talking about what is, as it were, completely cornified. Or take certain woods that are already used, where the effectiveness is based on what I say.

But then it is a matter of taking these grains from a plant, let us say from the tragacanth root, from the wolfberry, grinding them finely, but then treating them with the juice of one's own plant, that is, with the flower and leaf juice of one's own plant. In this way, one obtains a preparation that can perhaps be brought up to the third decimal place. In the third decimal, if it is now injected, it will actually introduce this phantom of the ego into the blood circulation, and then, under the influence of this preparation, in the case of actual syphilitic disease, which is already the disease of the whole blood, one has exactly the same picture as with the mercury cure, and then one has to ensure that the excess is driven out by means of strongly heating baths. So you will have to combine these two things: on the one hand, injection with a preparation as indicated, and then drive out what is in excess through strong baths.

But something else comes out as well. What comes out is what is present in the blood of the syphilis patient as harmful substances. This must also come out through perspiration. So we have to say: what has to be brought out must be brought out by sweat secretion alone. But first it has to be held. And it can be held by this rounding-off effect of the impulses contained in the wolfberry seeds. Now, you see, you can only cope with these things if you combine diagnosis and therapy closely.

Individualization is indispensable in medicine, and you can very well observe that especially in syphilitic diseases, the clinical picture in a fat person is quite different from that in a lean person. In a fat person, the syphilis toxin is extremely difficult to remove. I don't know if there are friends here who have experience in this. It is more difficult to remove the syphilis toxin from a fat person than from a thin person. A thin person eliminates it relatively easily. With a thin person, you may be able to do well by proceeding as I have described. But you must be sure that a reaction will occur, that there really is a strong perspiration, otherwise you will naturally get all kinds of internal diseases as a result, because the disease process will not occur. The reaction must be there. But it could be that in order to achieve the effect with fat people, too, so to speak, you have to resort to something else. And here it will be very good to turn to that which has already emerged more in nature, also in the astral process. It will be very good to take gallnuts in certain cases where you see that you cannot achieve a reaction with the usual plant. I mentioned them yesterday in a different context.

In the gallnuts you have already mentioned the essential roundness; the gallnut already shows you the mercurial nature in the vegetable kingdom. If you now treat the gall apple by grinding it on one side and taking the poison from the wasp that produced the gall apple on the other side and grinding it in with a very small dose, you will get a preparation that has a considerable effect and can even cause a reaction where it would otherwise be difficult to do so.

It is really the case with us that we actually have far too few cases of illness that we can observe piece by piece. I can imagine that for our friends who are treating physicians, bringing syphilis patients into the institute is not exactly ideal. But such things shed light on the whole therapy. You really learn something from such a treatment for the whole therapy, and I am also convinced that if someone sees how a patient who has been injected in this way and gets out of the bath, his skin looks different than it did before the bath ; how his skin looks, so that to the finer eye – one can perhaps see it with a microscope – it looks as if it is covered with little pockmarks, almost with smallpox, then one will learn how the organism is affected by something like this. So I think that this is the way to go in terms of syphilis treatment.

Because, you see, with this disease in particular, it is necessary not only to see to it that the patient is helped and then released, but it is also necessary to see to it that the patient endures the cure in his or her next life. And here I come to a question that was asked at the same time and that will be extremely interesting for most of you: meditation in addition to drug treatment, is there some kind of typical advice?

Well, I mention the previous syphilis just in connection with this question for the reason that in fact this question can perhaps be answered most intensively precisely in the case of syphilis. It will depend on whether the apparently cured syphilitic patient – and every syphilitic patient is initially only apparently cured, because it depends entirely on whether the disease can flare up again due to some later cause, and every apparently cured syphilis can flare up again later under certain circumstances – has made his organism anything other than a non-syphilitic patient. He has a different constitution, and it must be ensured that this different constitution is actually maintained for the future life, otherwise it will simply prove to be too weak in the face of certain attacks of ordinary life, and the syphilis can flare up again.

Now, of course, we will only deal with the question of meditative treatment in general, but it can be linked precisely to this. What happens with syphilis is that the ego organization becomes somewhat independent, which is not otherwise the case in a normal person. The syphilis patient has, through the injection, created a phantom out of his own organism, and as a result, for the rest of his life on earth, his ego organization is more independent than that of someone who has never had syphilis. He has this more independently, and this must be taken into account. So if you want to permanently cure a syphilis patient, you have to make sure that he begins to take a strong interest in pondering certain highly abstract thoughts over and over again in his mind, pondering them meditatively. You must therefore recommend that he meditatively think through, for example, geometric or mathematical problems, that is, in recurring rhythmic repetition, so that he never fails to actually maintain this artificial abstraction of his ego organization. You must accustom his thinking to entering into a certain inner constitution. Therefore, you will do him a great favor if you advise him: Every morning after you wake up, think about how a small triangle that resembles a large one behaves. They have the same angles but different sides. Think about it slowly at first: the same angles, different sides. Then think about it a little faster, then think about it even faster, then think about it so quickly that you can hardly keep up. Then start thinking more slowly again.

So thinking at different speeds, brought about by your own arbitrariness, will guide you in caring for this independent ego organization. That is one type of meditation. But wherever you see that the ego organization has become more independent through some healing process, you can try to make it possible for it to continue on its path through life by means of such a meditation, which, however, has to be applied particularly strongly in the case of the syphilis patient. Actually, the syphilitic patient must be encouraged to really supply his independent ego organization with such a meditation, which proceeds in a modified rhythm, on a permanent basis. Can you understand it?

These things lead us to consider other questions that have been asked. We will come back to everything again, I just want to have a context that is required by the matter.

Question about tragacanth.

They are pods. You open the pods and inside are seeds that are as hard as stones and have to be ground into a very fine powder.

Now another question that has been asked, which apparently has nothing to do with it – but inwardly things are connected – is about the occurrence of glaucoma. Today, I believe, glaucoma is hardly treated in any other way than by surgery, at most by homeopaths; but homeopathy is not yet rational. But now it is a matter of realizing what exactly such a phenomenon as glaucoma is based on. Glaucoma is, in a sense, viewed organically, according to the four limbs of human nature, physical body, etheric body, astral body and I, actually the opposite phenomenon of all possible ear infections from the overall process of the organism. The two things are almost polar. Ear infections are on one side, and glaucoma-like phenomena are on the other. If you just take the facts, it is like this: in glaucoma, there is a strong activity that infiltrates and substantially constitutes the vitreous humor of the eye. The vitreous humor becomes too intense internally in relation to its own substance. This results in a hypertrophy of the vitreous humor activity, and the glaucoma disease is actually based on this hypertrophy of the vitreous humor activity. But what then occurs?

The eye, as a sensory organ, is at the point where it is sufficiently independent according to the general bodily constitution, sufficiently objectively separated from the whole organism. If it is somewhat more separated from the whole organism than is the case with normal vision, then it is so diseased that the whole organism can no longer expand its activity over this organ.

In the case of glaucoma, it is extremely interesting to see how the etheric body – which is so extraordinarily important in the case of the eye – permeates the eyeball, so permeates it that the physical substance in the vitreous body appears quite strongly as a physical substance. If it goes beyond this boundary, it appears too strongly as a physical substance. The etheric body can no longer reach it, can no longer infiltrate it. So you have to make sure that the etheric body comes into action again, or that the physical activity in the eye is toned down. It is of course trivial, but true, to say that when something like this occurs, the entire organic activity in this part of the human organism is just too weak, partially paralyzed. It is too weak and must be stimulated. You can only stimulate it by making the exhalation of the human organism stronger than it is in the case of the person suffering from glaucoma at the time of his illness, or in the course of his illness. Therefore, if you can determine the correct moment, you will be able to self-correct the symptoms of glaucoma – but in relation to such partial illnesses the organism sometimes performs something extraordinary – by doing everything you can to organism to promote exhalation and thereby stimulate it to increase activity within the head, and you will then be able to counteract the activity within the glaucoma formation. And such a thing can be achieved by introducing calcium carbonate from bone meal into the human organism and combining it with some aerial roots of plants. This produces a preparation that does indeed regulate respiratory activity in the way it is needed in this case.

So I mean it like this: If we take calcium carbonate from bone earth and introduce it into the human organism, we get a correspondingly strong stimulation to exhale. But in order for the organism itself to become involved, we have to add some kind of impulse to this carbonic acid lime, so that it does not run sluggishly, so to speak, without the organism. These impulses are present in the roots that come from some trees or plants that climb rocks, roots that live outside in the air, and where what otherwise thrives in the ground as roots is carried out into the air. This changes the roots so that their impulses actually become more similar to respiratory activity, and this makes it possible to get the respiratory activity within oneself. One then feels it. Otherwise, the respiratory activity is stimulated quite involuntarily by the carbonate of lime. But if you mix the calcium carbonate with the sap of such aerial roots, then you get the urge to breathe in that way, and from that urge to breathe in that way, the strengthening of the whole human organization arises, which you need to balance what has been snatched from you in the formation of glaucoma.

It is precisely from such a case that one sees how it is necessary to look at the whole person everywhere. But the physical body is never the whole body. The physical body is always only a part; the physical body is liver, is stomach and so on, and the individual parts are connected with each other. The etheric body is already relatively strong for the whole person. And in a very grand sense, the whole human being is the astral body. It is just that this astral body is very strangely constituted. One might say that what is the astral body of a person up to the diaphragm – roughly speaking, locally confined – is quite different from what is the astral body below the diaphragm. What the astral body there does towards the head, towards the nervous-sense organization, is in its work, in its polarity, completely opposed to what is done in the metabolic-limb system. And consider the metabolism altogether, which essentially proceeds under the influence of the astral body. What we usually call metabolism is actually an activity of the human organism in which only the activity matters. In the metabolism, it is actually only a matter of absorbing and excreting substances. One might say that food as such, in substance, is basically not what interests the metabolism, but rather the overcoming of the outer substantial form of the food and the metamorphosis, not what the organism needs. But excretion begins right there in the metabolism itself. It actually goes from absorption directly into excretion. Only some of it is secreted. And this penetrates into the nerve-sense organization. The nerve-sense organization is of extraordinary importance in terms of substance, because the nerve substance is the metabolic substance taken to its logical conclusion.

As grotesque as this may seem, the reality is that the intestinal contents are, after all, nerve substance that has been left behind halfway through. The nerve substance, especially of the head, is the intestinal contents that have been processed to the end, the intestinal contents that have been transformed by the human organism, especially by the ego organization. The intestinal contents stop halfway and are excreted halfway. The contents of the nerve substance are driven to their very end and must then be processed by the organism as completely 'used up'. So the astral organism in the actual metabolism performs a completely different activity than the astral organism in the central nervous system. They are truly polar opposites. That is, one stops halfway, the other is carried to completion, and in between lies a zero point. It is actually the case that a complete polarity takes place. If you were to draw the etheric body, you would still draw it as an egg-shaped form, but you can no longer draw the astral body as an egg-shaped form. You have to draw it as two parts, above and below, which are actually quite different from each other in the way they work. And without understanding this, one can actually understand neither the healthy nor the sick human being. One must be clear that there is a completely different activity within the metabolism than within the nervous activity, within the nervous system. And only from this insight does the possibility arise to have a corresponding effect on the human organism. If, for example, you give a person preparations obtained from the flowers of plants, say, as essential oils, then you do not bring them from the lower part of the astral organism into the upper part, and they can only be used to bring about certain processes in the lower part, in the actual metabolic tract. The moment you use anything derived from the root of the plant, it expresses itself through from the lower to the upper tract of the astral body, and you have it in it because it in turn reacts from the head back to the organism. You have it in the whole organism.

Because you must understand that the ordinary view of the composition of the human organism is actually a terribly amateurish one. No, one would imagine that if, say, in some part of the human organism, after a certain period of life, new substance has appeared, that it has come through the process of ordinary metabolism, that is, the old substance has been shed, and through the process of ordinary metabolism the new substance has appeared. At least, that is how we imagine it. I do not believe that anyone who has studied medicine in any way today imagines it differently, as that substances in the human body, which are summarily different after a certain period of life, have come there by way of the usual metabolism, have been exchanged, other than through the metabolism.

But that is not the case. If you find a different substance in any part of the human organism after a certain period of life, it has never been excreted by the ordinary metabolism. The ordinary metabolism provides only the nervous system, only the internal structure of the nervous system, only the building blocks of the nervous system. Through the activity of the nerve-sense system, in connection with breathing, substances are then absorbed from the cosmic environment in an extraordinarily finely distributed state, which are incorporated into the organism by the nerve-sense organization and substantially replace what is lost. For the losses are much slower than one thinks. So the human body is never built up from food. Food only maintains the activity that is needed to organize the nervous system. The building, the substantial building, does not happen at all through nutrition, that is only chimerical, but it actually happens from the cosmos. So when you cut a nail that grows back, the substance that grows back is not from the food, which in turn has nothing else to do than to rebuild the nervous system, but it is the one that grows back, which actually replaces the organic substance in the human being substantially, absorbed from the cosmos.

This, of course, presents a very different picture of the composition of the human being than if one believes that the human being is a kind of tube, with food entering at one end, being exchanged in the meantime, and what is unusable being secreted. But the human being is not this tube. What happens in a tubular form takes place entirely within the human organism itself. That by which man is rebuilt after a certain period of life comes into the human organism through the senses with breathing and even with fine absorptions from the outside world through the senses. In this respect, the ears are extraordinarily important organs of absorption, as are the entire sensory organs that are spread over the body. So if you look at the human being properly, you will have to say from the outset that metabolism is the inner work of the human organism. The rhythmic organism and the nerve-sense organism are also involved in the construction of the human being.

Now, we will take it from there tomorrow and gradually answer the other questions that have been raised. Please tell me if you would like another session, since we only have so few hours. I think we will get to the individual problems that have been raised. If anyone still has problems, I would ask them to tell me tomorrow.

I have just been informed that some confusion has arisen because I spoke about mercury treatment on the one hand and about the preparation that I mentioned yesterday on the other. What is really at issue is that the mercury treatment has only been mentioned as a specifically effective treatment, but as one that is actually dangerous and can be avoided. So yesterday I meant to have given a complete replacement of the mercury treatment with the given preparation of tragacanth root.

I will start with the questions that are still on the old list, as we have another hour tomorrow. I believe there is something else among the newly arrived questions that is related: “How can we understand the success of Salvarsan therapy in the case of Lues?”

First of all, it would be a matter of describing this success in more detail. With such a therapy, it is always the case that a certain success can be achieved, but harmful side effects are present. And with Salvarsan therapy, it is completely unthinkable that one can even speak of rational therapeutic treatment, because the preparation, at least as it is described, is such that it tears apart the human body, that it tears the person apart. Nothing fits together. You can add whatever you want to the body, it can always be a success, but what then becomes of it, that is precisely what is unquestionably incalculable with salvarsan, because the things contradict each other. Therefore, one can only say: Salvarsan therapy is truly a child of the current way of thinking. And basically, the fact of the matter is that you can't seriously go into something like that. Does anyone perhaps wish to say something further about this?

Dr. Rascher: Does that then apply to all modern metal therapy in general, including bismuth therapy?

Not true, bismuth therapy can be overlooked from our point of view. What I mean is that in my courses themselves, bismuth therapy is discussed. But the preparation Salvarsan is impossible to overlook. It tears the body apart. Of course, there may be bismuth preparations that do the same when combined with other preparations. But our courses of treatment can show how bismuth itself acts.

Dr. Noll: Can an antimony preparation be effective against Lues?

Antimony is most effective between the sexual and respiratory tracts. Thus, anything in the human organism between these two tracts can be treated with antimony; the rest only insofar as the effect of one tract radiates into the whole organism. But it is not really possible to treat the sexual tract specifically with antimony for anything that is wrong with it. So, of course, the sequelae of syphilis can very well be treated with antimony, but to treat syphilis itself with antimony will certainly not lead to a complete cure. Antimony affects the pronounced middle organization of the human being, the entire digestive tract, the transition from the digestive tract to the circulatory tract and, of course, that part of the circulation that then passes into the sexual organs. But it is distinctly limited to this tract.

Dr. Kater: The deaths are enough confirmation of the bad effects of Salvarsan.

The most likely scenario is the following: Salvarsan has been used, not too long ago. The worst effects in their culmination will emerge in the patient after about five to ten years, maybe even in a seven-year period. Unfortunately, these case histories are not kept today. It is much more important for medical knowledge that the case history be continued beyond the healing process. Much more can be gained by this than by studying the internal make-up of the organism before the onset of the disease. Of course, this may be quite important in certain circumstances, but in most cases external factors are of particular importance.

Here I must again mention such cases: our friend Dr. Haakenson brought me a patient in Christiania. He had inexplicable symptoms of a rash. He was about forty-five years old when he was brought, and the whole picture presented itself to conventional medicine as an impossible-to-define complex of symptoms. You see, if you proceed purely from the organism, you cannot possibly arrive at a plausible cause. Of course, the doctor is usually dependent on what the patient tells him. I was able to say the following to this patient: I said, leaving out the intermediate links, “You must have been poisoned sometime between the ages of nine and 11 or 12.

Now it gradually came out that the man, who was about forty-five years old at the time, was thirsty as a boy at school. There happened to be a laboratory next to the schoolroom, with a weak hydrochloric acid solution on the window, which he drank to quench his thirst. And it was this poisoning that was still evident at the age of forty-five.

So you have to look at this external cause as the most important thing if you want to understand an illness. But afterwards, you actually have to carefully observe the organism after the healing to see what the healing does in the organism.

And that would be of particular importance in salvarsan therapy. In the case of salvarsan therapy, you certainly cannot apply what I said yesterday for the treatment of syphilis in general. I gave you a kind of meditative treatment afterwards, that is, with abstract concepts that have to be carried out conscientiously at different speeds, increasing speed, then decreasing speed again. This will enable you to make use of a psychic after-care, which admittedly takes years, especially with syphilis, if it is cured in the way I described yesterday. Even with mercury treatment, although I do not recommend it, such a psychic after-treatment would be beneficial. With salvarsan treatment, if you undergo such follow-up treatment, you will probably develop, at a later age, something that cannot be called dementia praecox, but is very similar to dementia praecox in later life. While with mercury treatment, if there is no follow-up treatment for mental health issues, psychiatric symptoms will develop due to the reasons I mentioned yesterday. But with Salvarsan treatment, it will turn out, precisely because of the disruption, that a kind of schizophrenia will actually occur, especially if you try a follow-up cure in the mental sense.

Dr. Palmer: It would be very interesting if you would share with us your opinion on so-called tertiary syphilis and iodine therapy.

From what can be said about it, it is essential to realize that when dealing with a very generalized disease such as syphilis, one is dealing, firstly, with the actual focus of the disease and its radiations, but then, because syphilis affects the whole person, reaching up into the ego organization, one is dealing with the counter-image in the nerve-sense man. It is quite possible to say schematically: the disease is located in the metabolic-limb-human being, but has its counter-image in the nerve-sense-human being, to which, for example, the larynx tract also belongs, everything that is connected with the differentiating upper breathing. These two things are intimately connected. What one accomplishes with mercury refers to the actual source and its radiation. What one accomplishes with the iodine preparation relates to the upper part. So that the polarizing effects in the nerve-sense apparatus can be paralyzed again by iodine when mercury treatment is applied. So that is the connection.

Now, as you will recall, yesterday I essentially indicated two parts to the entire syphilis treatment. The first is the injection with the preparation, the second is a bath treatment that expels. This corresponds to each other in a much more natural, rational sense, just as mercury and iodine do here. That is how it is intended. In most cases, therapy leads us to a balancing treatment of the two polar opposite organizations.

Dr. Palmer: So the gummata are to be considered as a consequence of too strong mercury therapy?

Yes, that is absolutely the case. Is there anything else to ask that is directly related to this?

Dr. Kater: What is the effect of arsenic?

The effect of arsenic in general is that arsenic essentially energizes the human astral body. That is the archetypal phenomenon of the effect of arsenic. Arsenic, even in its compounds, has such a strong effect on humans that one can say: arsenic energizes the astral body. Therefore, if you use arsenic, especially in liquid form, simply as Roncegno and Levis water in the appropriate dosage, you will always be able to act when it is necessary to stimulate the astral body to develop its natural impulses, so to speak.

Now, in every such disease, by the way, in syphilis as well as in other venereal diseases, a defect in the astral body is either the cause or the consequence. Therefore it is quite natural that arsenic also has an observable effect on it; but it need not heal. It does not go deep enough to be able to speak of healing. Dr....: Are the conditions in a child with congenital syphilis different from those in an adult?

You mean with hereditary syphilis? With syphilis in children, the conditions are of course completely different. And with children, if you can diagnose in time, you will achieve something with the arsenic cure, but not with the Salvarsan cure, but with the arsenic cure, in which you use the arsenic in its stronger dilution and, if possible, by adding lactic acid or something similar, you can have it work far enough in the body. In this way, you can achieve very favorable results, especially with children. For hereditary Lues is not actually syphilis, but hereditary Lues differs from syphilis in that syphilis, among the human organs, especially in adults, when it has occurred through infection, has its essential effect in the etheric body. The hereditary passes only into the physical body and is then not in the etheric body. And so you can, if you strongly stimulate the astral body with arsenic, transfer it to the etheric body, and then you really fight it rationally in the physical body. The difficulty with hereditary syphilis lies precisely in the fact that what is so difficult to access by earthly means has been thoroughly ruined.

What I described in the general lecture as being subject to the peripheral forces comes into consideration here. If you want to have any influence at all on such deformations and degenerations, on damage that is connected to the peripheral forces, then you have to set etheric forces in motion somehow.

Now this wolfberry, which I mentioned yesterday, has the peculiarity that it hardens, becomes horny, and is therefore not actually continuously surrounded by etheric forces. If you then obtain these etheric forces through the sap of its own flowers and leaves, you will end up with a preparation like the one I described yesterday. This then leads to rational thinking about the matter. Dr. Palmer: There is another question about tertiary syphilis.

One can only say about tertiary syphilis: the only truly rational thing to do is to not let it get close, to strive to catch syphilis in its first stage. Because once syphilis has become secondary or tertiary, then, especially for an occult observation, there is such a complicated complex of symptoms that does not need to be the same in two patients. It only appears so on the outside; on the inside, it does not need to be the same. So it is very difficult to get to the bottom of it, because you are really curing at one end and at the other end it breaks out in the opposite sense. Therefore, one can only say, when one has to take a position on it: secondary syphilis must, of course, be treated as I said yesterday, and in the case of tertiary syphilis, the aim will be to achieve a cure under certain circumstances, but it will always remain problematic.

Dr. Palmer: Regarding the glaucoma process and the ear process: the glaucoma process is seen as a kind of tumor process; ear processes are pus processes, inflammatory processes. Now, the eye in its entire development is to be understood as an inflammation process, and in the development of the ear we see a tumor formation process. Is it precisely this polar opposite that is the clinical picture of glaucoma on the one hand and ear suppuration on the other?

Isn't that obvious? If in the eye, under normal conditions, there is an inflammatory process, and if in the ear, under normal conditions, there is a tumor process, then the disease process in the eye must be an inflammatory process and in the ear an inflammatory process, namely that which occurs as the opposite. It is obvious, so to speak, that it must be so.

Now, on this occasion, it is perhaps possible to speak immediately of these polar processes of inflammation of the ear, especially of the middle ear. In the case of inflammation of the ear, one is dealing with an overgrowth of the etheric organization in this local tract. That this is so is evident not only from occult observation but also from the simple sight of a final state, final stage of inflammation of the middle ear with the adhesion of the organs and so on.

One can already see from the physical organism that this is an activity of the etheric body getting out of hand. Now it must be clear that this excessive ether organization in this tract immediately leads to a strengthening of the ego organization for this tract, which goes down into the subconscious.

We therefore have a physical formation that should not be there and that is dependent on the ego organization. We can best deal with this by, as it were, getting the breathing process going again. Internally, the respiratory process can be stimulated so that exhalation becomes more lively by using levisticum internally in an appropriate dosage. This stimulates the respiratory process in the opposite sense to that mentioned yesterday for the formation of glaucoma. One breathes more so that the strengthening of breathing goes inwards, whereas in the levisticum process it must go outwards. So the strengthening of the breathing process goes more inwards. And then, as strange as it seems, it will prove to be particularly beneficial for the ear infection if eurythmy is also used for the ear infection, eurythmy therapy. And it will be extremely beneficial to practise eurythmy therapy with the L, M and S in particular. That is to say, everything that relates to the ear is really only a localized process for a process in the whole human etheric body. Therefore, everything that is localized in the ear can be treated by promoting breathing in such a way that one also promotes only breathing - by having the letters listed performed in eurythmy therapy.

Now I would like to talk about a few more things.

Dr...: Would the eurythmy be different for ear infections and sclerosis?

If it is a case of sclerosis, then vowel eurythmy therapy will be used. This would involve vocalizing in eurythmy therapy. In inflammatory processes, it would be a matter of consonanting, and in particular L, M, S and such sounds.

Now other questions have been raised, which I would like to address in turn. The case that was asked about here and about which we already have some experience is particularly interesting. The question has been raised here:

Is therapeutic intervention still possible in cases of chronic arthritis deformans? We are currently trying one percent phosphoric oil and stannum. Is consonantal eurythmy indicated here as well?

Perhaps I could ask Dr. Palmer to briefly report on our Stuttgart case of arthritis deformans.

Dr. Palmer: The case we treated back then, and whose therapy has become widely known, was a very fresh case of arthritis deformans. It was Mrs. X., who, after four to five weeks of treatment with one percent phosphorus oil and four to five percent stannum trituration, had all symptoms that had previously been treated elsewhere in clinics. At that time, too, the patient underwent eurythmy therapy in addition to the medicinal treatment. Of course, we did not have the same success with the cases that came to our clinic and where we used the same therapy as we did with this fresh case. A small boy who had already developed the disease at the age of three or four was also treated with phosphorus oil and stannum, but we also had to give injections of levicowater to intensify the effect. At that time, this boy had a very acute inflammatory stage of arthritis deformans in his hip, and all the symptoms there also subsided, becoming completely painless. Of course, the destruction in the joints and the destruction of the cartilage was already so extensive that in this case, restoration of joint mobility was no longer possible.

That is, of course, the difficulty in general. Let us now first consider the two cases, because that will be very instructive. How old was our female patient, Mrs. X?

Dr. Palmer: Maybe in her late twenties, and the boy would have been twelve or thirteen years old, he was the American boy.

Dr. Kater says that her patient is twenty-seven years old and has been suffering from the condition since the age of twelve, a second patient is forty-five years old and has been suffering for three years, and a female patient is around seventy years old.

Now the question is whether you have achieved a cure. Have you used the same treatment here?

Dr. Kater says that she has only just applied the treatment.

The matter is extremely important because, with this disease, an enormous amount really does depend on the person with whom one is dealing. And it can be said that with this disease, with deforming arthritis, it is really the case that in all cases one must actually individualize to a certain extent, because the origin of this disease is closely related to the overall development of the person. Sometimes, when a disease occurs in middle age, as in the case I first asked Dr. Palmer to interpret, you have to ask yourself: does the cause lie very far back in childhood, or does it lie in later years?

The peculiar thing is precisely this: that with the appropriate physical disposition, namely with a constitutional weakness of the etheric body, in most cases the cause of arthritis deformans lies in psychological processes, namely in people who into a weak etheric body on waking, so that the astral body becomes stronger than it should be because of the weakness of the etheric body, because it is not sufficiently weakened when it penetrates into the etheric body. Grief, worry, shocks and consuming misery that arise in the soul actually act as the cause of this illness.

But now comes the strange thing: if you have a child, let us take an imaginary case, a child of ten years of age has, let us say, due to a previous measles disease or something similar, an etheric body that is only temporarily weakened; the astral body is too strong. Therefore, in this life-time of the child — I do not want to say ten, but twelve years, you will soon see why — if it has a grumpy educator who brings it into all sorts of states, so that it causes discord within itself, such childish sorrows initially predominate. And now let the fourteenth year approach, approximately of course, then you have two years from the twelfth year to the fourteenth year, and then two years to the sixteenth year, and in the sixteenth year there is again a possibility that the period of completion of completion of the period after sexual maturation, as the insult occurred before sexual maturation, that the matter is repeated rhythmically, but that then, of course, no new sorrow occurs, which would have to come from outside, but that the organic counter-image of sorrow occurs. Then the question is: how long does this process take to become properly peripheral, according to the periods that develop? At twenty-one years of age there is another period, that is, at nineteen, two years before this period, and two years after, at twenty-three years of age, there is again the possibility for this child that somehow the matter will progress. Now it is only a matter of how long this process takes to become properly peripheral, that it appears as a deformation? This may, under certain circumstances, range from the age of twelve, when the first causes lie, to the age of thirty, or even to the beginning of the age of forty. Then one has a completely different picture than when, for example, someone experiences the psychic cause only after the age of fifty or at the end of the age of forty, when it can also be experienced. Then these deformations occur from a completely different depth of the organism. And so we can say, let us assume that we are dealing with a patient who, for my sake, is in his late thirties or early forties and has severe deforming arthritis, which shows us that the causes actually lie quite far back. Then, under certain circumstances, we can suggest the following treatment based on this fact. In answer to your question, I have therefore constructed an ideal case, and the idea would now be to use arsenic injections, stannum and so on to evoke in such a case what has been discussed here, by giving hydrogen sulfide baths, thus initially acting on the nerve-sense system, on which the corresponding baths always act, and thereby affecting the peripheral human being from the outside. Then give, say, highly potentized arnica substance, arnica tincture or equisetum, from the inside, which in this case would be the same, so you work from the inside out in the same way, and you will probably achieve a cure for even long-standing arthritis deformans.

It is quite true that one can say: This would be a case that might be treated like this. While cases like the first one, as interpreted by Dr. Palmer, which certainly did not have its cause far back, can be treated with stannum and phosphorus oil. I was very happy to mention this case because it is instructive to see, especially in such a very deep-seated disease, how one must individualize.

A case is described in which the patient underwent something similar in her youth. In her twenties, she then suffered from a gonorrheal infection, followed immediately by very severe chronic arthritis. She is now about forty-five years old and in a very desolate condition.

It's almost as if I had constructed this case ideationally earlier! Hydrogen sulfide baths and internally Equisetum or Arnica, possibly, if it is not directly attacking, injections.

Dr. Kater: The case you mentioned is exactly the same as that of the 27-year-old woman among my patients. You have outlined it precisely without knowing it.

Now we also have an interesting question here: diseases of the gastrointestinal tract as a result of shock. Well, these can occur as a result of shock, but I also believe they can occur as a result of other psychological effects, for example, from prolonged grief and the like, which is always rekindled; this will be the case especially in female personalities. Very painful colicky conditions can occur. There may also be a lethargy of the entire gastrointestinal tract, and even a complete failure may occur under certain circumstances, but a failure that is very often associated with pain at the same time. Isn't the clinical picture something like this? (Answer: Yes!) — This is now a very common illness, and it is very interesting to observe what actually happened. In each such case, the following has happened: The human astral body is a very differentiated organism. When you get to know this human astral body, you will find that the organs behind the sexual organs towards the renal tract and bounded at the top by the pulmonary and cardiac tracts, in other words in this part, the astral body adapts very strongly to the etheric body. So much so that one can actually say: the etheric body is the decisive one for this tract. The astral body takes on in its movements, in its forms, what the etheric body does. This is quite different in the sexual tract. In the sexual tract, the astral body is very active in itself, suppressing the activity of the etheric body to a certain extent. If a shock effect occurs here, then the activity that the astral body develops in the sexual tract forces its way into the digestive tract, so that one has a displacement of the astral activity, and all the symptoms are then the ones mentioned above. And one has to really initiate that process that brings the astral body back to its proper place in such a case.

One must really understand this connection, which actually takes place entirely within the higher members of the human organism. The other things that take place in the physical body are merely consequences, merely external symptoms. What takes place takes place between the etheric body and the astral body, and that is partially in the particular region of the body.

You will achieve something in all cases if you apply either compresses or rubbings with oxalic acid, i.e. simply oxalic acid, which you can best obtain by squeezing clover. You squeeze the clover to obtain the oxalic acid. This is where it is most effective. And of course it is best used by rubbing it in. It is extraordinarily effective in energizing the etheric system in the digestive tract. This results in a particularly strong activity. And now you have to try to get this astral sexual system, which has gone in there, back again. You get this back either through a silver preparation per os in the appropriate dosage, or through a silver injection used in the fifth or sixth decimal place. Silver, when introduced into either the circulatory or digestive system, always tends to restore deformations to the higher limbs of organization.

You see, if you apply these two processes one after the other, you will achieve very good results, especially with shock effects. Shock effects are extremely interesting. And if you have cured a shock effect, if, let's say, there is a typical shock effect as we have just described it, then you will notice the following when you continue to follow the patient. If you know how to ask the right questions, you will get answers from the patient that go something like this: It is very strange, but since I got well back then, my heart has been working quite differently; since then, when I perceive something startling, a cannon shot or something like that, my heart acts as if it wanted to calm me down, as if I had a being on it that wanted to calm me down.

In this you see how truly polarizing processes are present in every regulatory intervention, not only in a healing intervention, in the human organism. This heart effect, of which the patient speaks, which also essentially takes place in the etheric and the astral, is the polarizing counteraction to what you actually did to establish the correct relationship between the sexual tract and the digestive tract. That is what needs to be said with regard to this shock effect.

Now tomorrow I will talk in more detail about an interesting question, namely nervous diseases, in particular spinal cord diseases, which is written down as the first question, so to speak. We will meet again tomorrow at half past eight. I just want to say something now, because it seems to me that there really is a very topical question here, which is also on the note, namely about children wetting the bed. It seems to be occurring in a very intensified form.

When children wet the bed, it is a typical weakness of the astral body. The astral body simply does not have the strength it should have. But if you use arsenic in the case of bedwetting, even in the healthy form of Levicowasser or Roncegnowasser, then you will usually achieve a strong but extraordinarily short action, especially in the case of bedwetters, through their overall organization. The children will still wet their beds; but you will definitely achieve good results if you use the substance that you can obtain by squeezing the leaves and flowers of St. John's wort, Hypericum perforatum. I don't know if you know that this is the only plant that has three sets of stamens. It belongs to the 18th Linne class, it has yellow petals and leaves that look as if there were holes in them when you look through them. If you squeeze this plant, you get a juice. It is essentially due to this bitter extractive contained in this plant, also a substance that has a very strong and lasting effect on the inner mobility of the astral body and strengthens it. And as a result, it may lead to healing if you then still have a moral effect on the child by simply saying that he is obliged to pay attention to his functions. This moral influence should actually take place precisely in the case of such things, which, don't you think, are on the border between naughtiness and disease. Please don't misunderstand me, I know, of course, that it is a disease, but it is on the border between naughtiness and disease. And because moral will does indeed have a great influence, it should not be disregarded. If you cure such a thing in a child – of course you can cure it with Hypericum – you weaken the child's will if you do not at the same time encourage it, give it an impulse in the moral sense. That would be said with regard to bedwetting.

Then tomorrow we will talk about neuropathic children, especially children with various forms of dementia praecox. Then we will discuss some other questions, and I will try to take all of these questions into account.

Dr...: The question is asked as to how old the juice may be.

It should not be allowed to become too old; but if you prepare it by squeezing it as well as possible to a certain quantity, say one gram of leaf and flower mixture, half and half, then you will be able to supply a glass of water with it, and you can then portion it out and use it in this way for half a year.