The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If I were asked to map out a course of medical study for people who would want to approach this study immediately and finish it in a certain period of time, I would begin—after the necessary natural scientific background had been acquired—with a discussion of the various functions in the human organism. I would feel bound to begin with a kind of anatomical-physiological study of the foodstuffs as they are worked through from the stage where they are worked upon by the ptyalin to that of being worked on by the pepsin and then taken up into the blood. Then, after considering the general act of digestion in the narrower sense, I would pass on to discussion of the system of heart and lungs and all that is connected with it. I would then discuss everything connected with the human kidney system. The kidney system must then be discussed in relation to the entire nerve-sense apparatus—a relationship not recognized at all today. Then I would lead on to the system of liver, gall, and spleen, and this cycle of study would gradually open up a vista of how things are arranged in the human organism, a vista that would be needed in order to build up the knowledge that it is the task of an anthroposophical spiritual science to develop. Then, with the light that would have been shed upon the results of sense-perceptible empirical research, it would be possible to pass on to therapy.

In the few days at our disposal, it is only possible, of course, for me to give a few hints about this wide and all embracing domain. A great deal of what I have to say, therefore, will be based upon a treatment of empirical evidence that is not customary today, but I think it will be quite accessible to anyone who possesses the requisite physiological and therapeutic knowledge. I shall have to speak differently from the way people are accustomed to, but I will really present nothing that cannot in some way be brought into harmony with the data of modern sense-oriented empirical knowledge, if these data are studied in all their connections.

Everything I say will be aphoristic, merely hinting at ultimate conclusions. Our starting point, however, must be the sense-perceptible empirical investigations of modern times, and the intermediate stages will have to be mastered by the work of doctors everywhere. This intermediate path is exceedingly long, but it is absolutely essential because, as things are today, nothing of what I present to you will be fully acknowledged if these intermediate steps are not taken—at least in relation to the most important phenomena. I do not believe that this will prove as difficult as it appears at present, if people will only submit to bringing the preliminary work that has already been done into line with the general conceptions I am trying to indicate here. This preliminary work is excellent in many respects, but its goal still lies ahead.

In the last lecture I tried to show you how broadening ordinary knowledge can give us insight into the human being. And now, bearing in mind what I have just said, let me add the following. To begin with you may find it offensive to hear it said in anthroposophy that the human being, as he stands before us in the physical world, consists of a physically organized system, an etherically organized system, an astrally organized system, and what characterizes him as an ego organization. You do not need to take offense at these expressions. They are used merely because some kind of terminology is necessary. By virtue of this ego system, the human being is able to develop that inner soul cohesion, the inward soul life, that cannot be found in animals. This cohesion reveals itself on the one hand in the fact that the human being can unify his inner experience in an ego-point, if I may use that expression, from which all his general organic activity rays out in a certain sense, at least in the conscious state. It reveals itself on the other hand in the fact that during his earthly evolution the human being has a different relationship to sexual development from that of the animal organization. Though of course there are exceptions, the animal organization is such that sexual maturity represents a certain point of culmination. After this, deterioration sets in. This organic deterioration may not begin in a very radical sense after the first stage of sexual maturity, but there is a certain organic culmination. On the other hand, the physical development of the human being receives a certain impetus at puberty. Even in the outer empirical sense, then, if we take all the factors into account, there is already a difference between the human being and the animal.

You may say that it is really an abstract method of classification to speak of physical, etheric, astral, and ego organizations. This objection has been made by many people, especially from the side of philosophy. We take the functions of the human organism and differentiate them, and—since differentiations do not necessarily point back to any objective causes—people think that it is all an abstraction. This is not so. In the course of these lectures we will see what really lies behind this classification and division, but I assure you they are not merely the outcome of a desire to divide things into categories.

When we speak of man's physical organization, this encompasses everything in the human organism that can be dealt with by the same methods we adopt when we are doing experiments and investigations in the laboratory. We encompass all this when we speak about the physical organization of the human being.

Regarding the human etheric organization, however, which is incorporated into the physical, our mode of thinking can no longer confine itself to the ideas and laws that apply when we are doing experiments and making observations in the laboratory. Whatever we may think of the etheric organization of the human being as revealed by super-sensible knowledge—without needing to enter into mechanistic or vitalistic methods in any way—it is apparent to direct perception (and this is a question that would be the subject of lengthy study in the curriculum that I sketched earlier) that the etheric organization as a whole is involved in the fluid nature within the human organization. You need only think of this as a structure of functions that can be grasped directly in this fluid nature. The purely physical mode of thinking, therefore, must confine itself to what is solid in the human organization, to the solid state of aggregation. We understand the human organization properly only when we conceive of what is fluid in this organization as being permeated through and through with life, as living fluids—not merely as the fluids we have in outer, inorganic nature. This is the sense in which we say that the human being has an etheric body.

We do not need to enter into hypotheses about the nature of life but merely to understand what is implied, for example, by saying that the cell is permeated with life. Whatever views we may hold—mechanistic, idealistic, spiritualistic, or the like—when we say that the cell is permeated with life, as the crass empiricist also says, then what is revealed to direct perception yielded by the methods I have referred to here shows that the fluid nature in the human being is likewise permeated with life. But this is the same as saying that the human being has an etheric body. We must think of everything solid as being embedded in the fluid, and here we already have a contrast: we apply all the ideas and laws derived in the inorganic world to the solid parts of man's being, whereas we think not only of the cells—the smallest organisms present in the human being—as living but of the fluid nature in its totality as permeated with life.

Furthermore, when we come to the airy nature of the human being, it appears that the gases filling his being are in a state of perpetual interchange with each other. In the course of these lectures we shall have to show that this is neither an inorganic interchange nor merely a process of interchange mediated by the solid organs, but that an individual lawfulness controls the inner interchange of the gases in the human being, the vortex formed with the interworkings of the gases. Just as there is an inner lawfulness in the solid substances, expressing itself, among other things, in the relationship between the kidneys and the heart, so we must postulate the existence of a lawfulness within the airy or gaseous organism—if I may use this expression—a lawfulness that is not confined to the physical, solid organs. Anthroposophy designates this lawfulness that directly underlies the airy or gaseous organism as the astral lawfulness, the astral organization. This lawfulness would not be there in the human being if his airy organization had not permeated the solid and fluid organizations. The astral organization does not penetrate directly into the solid and the fluid. It does, however, directly lay hold of the airy organization. This airy organization directly takes hold of the solid and fluid, so that in the airy human being there is now an organized astral organization by which this airy organization has a definite inner form, which is naturally fluctuating.

By ascending through the aggregate states, we thus arrive at the following conclusions: when we consider the solid substances in the human being we do not need to assume anything other than a physical organization. In the case of the living fluidity that permeates the solid, physical organization, we must assume the existence of something that is not exhausted by the physical lawfulness, and here we come to the etheric organism, which is a self-contained system. In the same sense I give the name astral organization to that which does not directly lay hold of the solid and fluid but first of all penetrates the gaseous organization. I do not call this the astral lawfulness but rather the astral organism, because it is again a self-contained system.

And now we come to the ego organization, which penetrates directly only into the differentiations of warmth in the human organism. We can therefore speak of a warmth organism, a warmth man. The ego organization penetrates directly into this warmth man. The ego organization is, of course, something super-sensible and brings about the various differentiations of the warmth. In these differentiations of warmth the ego organization has its immediate life. It also has an indirect life in the rest of the organism through the warmth working upon the airy, fluid, and solid organizations.

In this way the human organism becomes more and more transparent. Everything that I have been describing expresses itself in the physical human being as he lives on the earth. What in a certain way can be called the most intangible organization of all—the ego-warmth organization—works down indirectly upon the gaseous, fluid, and solid organizations, and the same is true of the others. Thus the way in which this whole configuration penetrates the human organization, and known through sense-oriented empirical observations, will find expression in any solid system of organs verifiable by outer anatomy. Hence, taking the various organ systems, we find that only the physical organ system is directly related to its corresponding lawfulness, the physical-solid lawfulness; the fluid is less directly related, the gaseous still less directly, and the element of warmth most distantly of all, although even here there is still a certain relation through mediation.

All these things—and I can indicate them here only in the form of ultimate conclusions—can be confirmed by an extended empiricism simply from the phenomena themselves. Due to the short time at our disposal I can only give you certain ultimate conclusions.

In the anatomy and physiology of the human organization we can observe, to begin with, the course taken by food up to the point when it reaches the intestines and the other intricate organs in that region and is then absorbed into the lymph and blood. We can follow the process of digestion or nourishment in the widest sense up to this point of absorption into the blood and lymph. If we limit ourselves to this realm, we can get on quite well with the not entirely mechanistic mode of observation that is adopted by natural science today. An entirely mechanistic mode of perception will not lead to the final goal in this domain, because the lawfulness observed externally in the laboratory and characterized by natural science as inorganic lawfulness is always playing into the living organism in the digestive tract. From the outset, the whole process is involved in life, even at the stage of the ptyalin-process.

If we pay heed only to the fact that the outer, inorganic lawfulness is immersed in the life of the digestive tract, we can get on quite well, as far as this limited sphere is concerned, by confining ourselves to what can be observed merely within the physical organization of the human being. But then we must be absolutely clear that a remnant of the digestive activity still remains, that the process of nourishment is still not quite complete when the intestinal tract has been passed, and that the subsequent processes must be studied by a different means of observation. But as far as the limited sphere is concerned, the best we can do to begin with is to study all the transformations of substance by means of analogies, just as we study things in the outer world. Then we find something that modern science cannot readily acknowledge but that is nonetheless a truth, resulting indeed from modern science itself. It will be the task of our doctors to pursue these matters scientifically and then to show from the sense-perceptible empirical facts themselves that as a result of the action of the ptyalin and pepsin on the food the food is divested of every trace of its former condition in the outer world?

We take in food from the mineral kingdom—you may dispute the expression “food,” but I think we understand each other—we take in food from the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. What we take in as food belongs originally to the mineral, plant, and animal organizations. The substance most nearly akin to the human organization is, of course, the milk that the suckling baby receives from the mother. The child receives it as soon as it has left the human organization. The process enacted within the human organism during the absorption of nourishment is this: through the absorption of the food into the various glandular products, every trace of its origin is eliminated. It is really true to say that the human organization itself makes it possible to engage in the purely natural scientific, inorganic mode of observation. In fact, human chyle comes nearest of all to the outer physical processes in the moment when it is passing from the intestines into the lymph and bloodstream. The human being finally obliterates the external properties that the chyle still possessed until this moment. He wants to have it as similar as possible to the inorganic organization. He needs it thus, and this again distinguishes him from the animal kingdom.

The anatomy and physiology of the animal kingdom reveal that the animal does not eliminate the nature of the substances introduced to its body to the same extent; the excretory products are different for the animal. The substances that pass into the body of the animal retain a greater resemblance to the outer organization, to the vegetable and animal organizations, than is the case with the human being. They proceed on into the bloodstream still in accordance with their external form and with their own inner lawfulness. The human organization has advanced so far that when the chyle passes through the intestinal wall, it has become as close as possible to the inorganic. The purely physical human being actually exists in the region where the chyle passes from the intestines into the heart-lung organization, if I may express myself in this way.

It is at this point that our way of looking at things first becomes heretical to orthodox natural science. The entire heart-lung tract—the vascular system—is the means whereby the foods that have now become entirely inorganic so to speak, are led over into the realm of life. The human organization cannot exist without providing its own life. In a more encompassing sense, what happens here resembles the process occurring when the inorganic particles of protein, let us say, are transformed into organic; into living protein, when dead protein becomes living protein. Here again we do not need to enter into the question of the inner being of man but only into what is continually being said in physiology. Due to the shortness of time we cannot speak of the scientific theories about how the plant produces living protein, but in the human being it is the system of heart and lungs, with all that belongs to it, that is responsible for transformation of the protein into something living after the chyle has become as inorganic as possible.

We can therefore say that the system of heart and lungs is there so that the physical system may be drawn up into the etheric organization. The system of heart and lungs therefore brings about a vitalizing process whereby the inorganic is drawn into the organic, is drawn into the vital sphere through the process that takes place in the heart-lung system. (In the animal it is not quite the same, the process being less definite.) Now it would be absolutely impossible for this process to take place in our physical world if certain conditions were not fulfilled in the human organization. The chyle's being drawn into, transformed into an etheric organization could not take place within the sphere of earthly lawfulness unless other factors were present. Angels would be able to perform this, but if they did then they would fly around having merely a mouth, an esophagus, and then finally a gastrointestinal system, which would then stop and disappear into the etheric. Thus such digestive tracts would float around and would be carried by invisible etheric angel-beings.

What I am describing here could not take place in the physical world at all. That would be impossible. The process is possible in the physical world only because the whole etheric system is drawn down, as it were, into the physical, is incorporated into the physical. This happens as a result of the absorption of oxygen in the breathing. Therefore man is not an angel but can walk around physically on the earth, can walk around because his angelic aspect is physicalized through the absorption of oxygen. The entire etheric organization is projected—but projected as something real—into the physical world; the whole is then fulfilled as a physical system; that which otherwise could be only of a purely super-sensible nature comes to expression as the system of heart and lungs. And so we begin to realize that just as carbon is the basis of the animal, plant, and human organizations (though in the human organization in a less solid way than in the plant) and “fixes” the physical organization as such, so is oxygen related to the etheric organization in so far as this expresses itself in the physical domain.

Here we have the two substances of which the formed, the vitally formed protein is primarily composed. But this mode of observation can be applied equally well to the proteinaceous cell, the cell itself. We simply extend the kind of observation that is usually applied to the cell by substituting a macroscopic study for the microscopic study of the cell in the human being. We observe the processes that form the connection between the digestive tract and the heart-lung tract. We observe then in an inner sense, seeing the connection between them, perceiving how an etheric organization is drawn in and “fixed” into the physical as a result of the absorption of oxygen.

But you see, if this were all, we would have a being that existed in the physical world possessing merely a digestive organization and an organization of heart and lungs. Such a being would not yet be an ensouled being; the element of soul could occur only in the super-sensible, and it is still our task to show how what makes the human being a sentient being incorporates itself into his solid and fluid nature, permeating the solid and fluid organizations and making him a sentient being, a being of soul. Only when we are able to trace the ensouled aspect can we perceive man as an ensouled being. The entire organization in which oxygen plays a role is now within the human being due to the fact that we bind the etheric organization into the physical body by oxygen.

The ensouled organization cannot come into being unless there is a direct point of attack, as it were, for the airy man, with a further possibility of access to the physical organization. Here we have something that lies very far indeed from modern ways of thinking. I have told you that oxygen takes hold of the etheric through the organization of heart and lungs; the astral makes its way into the organization of man through another system of organs. This astral nature, too, needs a physical system of organs. I am referring here to something that does not take its start from the physical organs but from the airy nature (not only the fluid nature) that is connected with these particular organs—that is to say, from the airy organization that is bound up with these solid organs. The astral-organic forces radiate out from this gaseous organization in the human organism. Indeed, the corresponding physical organ itself is first formed by this very radiation, on its backward course. To begin with, the gaseous organization radiates out, makes man into an ensouled organism, permeates all his organs with soul, and then streams back again by an indirect path, so that a physical organ comes into being and plays its part in the physical organization of the human being. This is the kidney system, which is regarded primarily as an organ of excretion. Its excretory functions, however, are secondary. I will return to this later, for I have yet to speak of the relationship between the kidney excretions and the higher function of the kidneys. As physical organs the kidneys are excretory organs (they too, of course, have entered the sphere of vitality), but in addition to this, in their underlying airy nature, they are the radiating-organs for the astral organism which now permeates the airy nature and from there works directly into the fluids and the solids in the human organism.

The kidney system, therefore, is that which from an organic basis permeates us with sentient faculties, with qualities of soul and the like—in short it permeates us with an astral organism. Sense-perceptible, empirical science has a great deal to say about the functions of the kidneys, but if you penetrate what you can see and observe of these functions with a certain instinctive inner perception, you will be able to discover the relations between inner sentient experience and the functions of the kidneys—remembering always that the excretions are only secondary indications of that from which they have been excreted. What the kidneys excrete arises through the function of the kidneys. In so far as the functions of the kidneys underlie the sentient system, this is expressed even in the various kinds of excretions.

If you want to extend scientific knowledge in this field, I recommend that you do experiments with a more sensitive individual and try to find out the essential change that takes place in the renal excretions when he is thinking in a cold or in a hot room. Even purely empirical tests like this, suitably varied in the usual scientific way, will provide results. If you make absolutely systematic investigations, you will discover what a difference there is in the renal excretions of a person thinking either in a cold or a warm room. You can also do the experiment by asking someone to think objectively and putting a warm cloth around his head. (The conditions for the experiment must of course be prepared in an orderly way. ) Then examine the renal excretions, and examine them again when he is thinking about the same thing and cold compresses have been applied to his feet. You can conduct experiments that are entirely sense-perceptible and empirical that will provide you with evidence.

The reason that there is so little concern with such inquiries today is that people have an aversion to entering into these matters. In embryological research into cell division, the allantois and the amnion are not studied carefully. These discarded organs have been investigated, but to understand the whole process of human development the accessory organs in embryonic development must be studied much more exactly than the processes that arise from the division of the germ cell itself. Our underlying task here, therefore, is to establish starting points for rational research. This is of the greatest significance, for only in this way will we reach the point of having insight into the human being so that we have before us not a visible but an invisible giant cell.

Today we do not describe the cell as we describe the human being, because microscopy does not lead so far. The curious thing is that if one studies the realm of the microscopic with the methods I am describing here, wonderful things come to light, for instance the results achieved by the Hertwig school. The cell can be investigated up to a certain point with the microscope, but then there is no possibility of further research into the more complicated life processes. Ordinary, sense-oriented empiricism comes to a standstill here, but with spiritual science you can follow the facts further. You now look at the human being in his totality, and the tiny point represented by the cell grows out, as it were, into the whole being of man.

From this you can proceed to learn how the purely physical organization is in every way connected with the structure of the carbon, just as the transition to the etheric organization is connected with the structure of oxygen. If you now make exact investigations into the kidney system, you will find a similar connection with nitrogen. Thus you have to study carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and in order to trace all the roles played by nitrogen in the astral permeation of the organism, you need only follow, through a series of very precise experiments, the metamorphoses of uric acid and urea. Precise study of the secondary excretions of uric acid and urea will provide definite evidence that the astral permeation of the human being proceeds from the kidney system. This will also be shown by other things connected with the activity of the kidneys, even to the point where pathological conditions play a role, for example if we find blood corpuscles in the urine. The kidney system radiates the astral organization into the human organism. Here we must not think of the physical organization but of the airy organization that is bound up with it. If nitrogen did not play a part, the whole process would remain in the domain of the super-sensible, just as we would be merely etheric beings if oxygen were not to play its part. The outcome of the nitrogen process is that the human being can live on earth as an earthly being. Nitrogen is the third element connected with this.

There is thus a continual need to widen the methods adopted in anatomy and physiology by applying the principles of spiritual science. This is not in any sense a matter of fantasy. You will see that this is so when you receive your first results. If you study the kidney system and do your experiments as accurately as you possibly can, examining the urea and uric acid excretions under different astral conditions, step by step you will find confirmation of what I have said. Only in this way will you be able to penetrate the constitution of the human organism.

We can therefore say that everything entering the human being through the absorption of food is carried into the astral organism by the kidney system. There still remains the ego organization. All this is received into the ego organization primarily as a result of the working of the liver-gall system. The warmth structure and the warmth structure in the system of liver and gall radiate out in such a way that the human being is permeated with the ego organization, and this is bound up with the differentiation of warmth in the organism as a whole.

Now it is quite possible to adapt your methods of investigation as precisely as possible to what I have said. Take certain lower animals where there is no trace at all of an ego organization in the psychological sense. With these you will not find a developed liver, and still less any bile. These things develop in the phylogeny of the animal kingdom only when the ego organization appears. The development of liver and gall runs absolutely parallel with the degree to which the ego organization unfolds in a living being. Here, too, you have an indication for a series of physiological investigations in connection with the human being, only of course they must cover the different periods of human life. You will gradually discover the connection of the ego organization to the functions of the liver in the human being.

You need only observe particular pathological conditions that are lethal—certain childhood illnesses, for example—in order to find out how certain psychological phenomena, tending not toward the life of feeling but toward the ego, are connected with the secretion of bile. This might form the basis of an exceedingly fruitful series of investigations that can be derived to some extent out of what our sense-oriented, empirical science provides. You will see that the ego organization is connected with hydrogen in the same way that the physical organization is connected with carbon, the etheric organization with oxygen, and the astral organization with nitrogen. You will be able to relate all the differentiations of warmth—I can only hint at this—to the specific function carried out in the human organism by hydrogen, in combination with other substances, of course. And so, as we ascend from the sense-perceptible to the super-sensible and make this super-sensible a concrete experience by recognizing its physical expressions, we come to the point of being able to conceive the whole human being as a highly complicated cell, a cell that is permeated with soul and spirit.

It is really only a matter of taking the trouble to examine and develop the marvelous results achieved by natural science and not simply leaving them where they are. My understanding and practical experience of life convince me that if you will set yourselves to an exhaustive study of the results of the most orthodox empirical science, if you will relate the most approachable with the most remote and really study the connections between them, you will constantly be led to what I am telling you here. I am also convinced that the so-called “occultists” of the modern type will not help you in the least. What will be of far more help is a genuine examination of the empirical data offered by orthodox natural science. Natural science itself leads you to recognize truths that can be perceived only supersensibly but that indicate, nevertheless, that the empirical data must be followed up in this or that direction. You yourselves can certainly discover the methods; they will be imposed by the facts before you. There is no need to complain that such guiding principles create prejudice or that they influence by suggestion. The conclusions arise out of the things themselves, but the facts and conditions prove to be highly complicated, and if further progress is to be made, all that has been learned in this way about the human being must now be investigated in connection with the outer world.

I want you now to follow me in a brief train of thought. I am giving it merely by way of example, but it will show you the path that must be followed. Take the annual plant that grows out of the earth in spring and passes through its yearly cycle. Now relate these phenomena that you observe in the annual plant with other things you can observe—above all the custom of peasants who, when they want to keep their potatoes through the winter, dig pits of a certain depth and put the potatoes into them so that they may keep for the following year. If the potatoes were kept in an ordinary open cellar, they would not remain fit to eat. Investigations have proven that what originates from the interplay between the sunshine and the earth is contained within the earth during the subsequent winter months. Warmth conditions and light conditions are at play dynamically under the surface of the earth during the winter, so that in winter the aftereffects of summer are actually contained within the earth. Summer surrounds us outside the earth's surface. In winter, the aftereffects of summer work under the earth's surface. And the consequence is that the plant, growing out of the earth in its yearly cycle, is impelled to grow, first and foremost, by the forces that have been poured into the earth by the sun of the previous year, for the plant derives its dynamic force from the soil. (I have to make rather large leaps, of course, but these things can all be verified easily through empirical observations.) This dynamic force that is drawn out of the soil can be traced up into the ovary and on into the developing seed. So you see, we can arrive at a botany that really corresponds to the whole physiological process only if we do not confine ourselves to the dynamic forces of warmth and light and the light conditions during the year when the plant is growing. We must rather take our start from the root, and so from the dynamic forces of light and warmth of at least the year before. These forces can be traced right up into the ovary, so that in the ovary we have something that really is brought into being by the forces of the previous year.

Now examine the leaves of a plant, and, still more, the petals. You will find that in the leaves there is a compromise between the dynamic forces of the previous year and those of the present year. The leaves contain elements that are thrust out from the earth and those that work in from the environment. It is in the petals that the forces of the present year are represented in their purest form. The coloring and so forth of the petals represents nothing that is old—it all comes from the present year.

You cannot follow the processes in an annual plant if you take only the immediate conditions into consideration. Examine the structural conditions that follow one another in two consecutive years. (What the sun imparts to the earth, however, has a much longer life.) Do a series of experiments concerning the way in which the plants continue to be relished by creatures such as the grub of the cockchafer, and you will see that what you first thought to be an element of the plant belonging to the present year must be related to the sun forces of the previous year. You know what a prolonged larval stage the cockchafer undergoes, devouring the plant the whole time.

These matters must be the subject of exact research; only the guiding principles can be given from the spiritual world. Research will show that the structure of the substances found in the petals and leaves, for instance, is of an essentially different character from the structure of the substances found in the root or even the seed itself. There is a tremendous difference, and this leads to the distinction between a tea prepared from the petals or leaves of plants and an extract of substances found in roots or seeds. You will find that this difference is the basis for the other differences, so that the effect of a tea prepared from petals or leaves upon the human digestive system is quite different from that of an extract prepared from roots or seeds. In this way you relate the organization of the human being to the surrounding world, and everything you discover can be verified through purely physical, sense-perceptible methods. You will find, for instance, that disturbances in the transition of the chyle into the etheric organization, as it is brought about by the system of heart and lungs, will be influenced by the leaves; everything connected with the digestive tract is influenced essentially by a tea derived from petals. An extract of roots and seeds influences the wider activity that works on into the vascular system and even into the nervous system. In this way you will discover rationally the connection between what is going on within the human organism and the substances from which our store of remedies may be derived.

In the next lecture I will have to continue this subject, showing you that there is an inner connection between the different structures of the plants and the human nerve-sense organization and the organization of his digestive tract.

As we begin to view the human organism increasingly in the way that I unfortunately have been able to indicate only very briefly, many things become terribly important concerning judgment of the human being in health and disease, things not otherwise appreciated in their full significance. Very little attention is paid nowadays to what I have called in my book, Riddles of the Soul, the threefold nature of the physical being of man. Yet a proper assessment of this threefold nature of the physical human being is of the greatest significance for pathology and therapy.

In accordance with this threefold nature of the physical human being, the nerve-sense system is to be pictured as localized mainly in the head, though of course this head organization really extends over the entire human being. The nervous and sensory functions of the skin, and also those within the human organization, must be included. However, we cannot arrive at a well-founded conception of the modes of activity in the human organism unless we differentiate, theoretically to begin with, the nerve-sense system from the rest of the organization as a whole.

The second system in the human being, the rhythmic system, includes in the functional sense everything that is subject to rhythm—primarily, therefore, the breathing system and its connection with the system of blood circulation. In the wider sense, too, there are rhythms that are of essential significance to the human being, although these can be disrupted in many ways; I am referring to the rhythms of day and night, of sleeping and waking, as well as everything else rhythmical, the rhythmic assimilation of food and so on. These latter rhythms are constantly disrupted by the human being, but the consequences of such disturbances have to be brought into equilibrium by certain regulative factors found in the organism. As a second member of the human organization, then, we have the rhythmic human being, and, as a third member, the metabolic organism, in which I include the limb organism, because the functional processes that arise as a result of the movements of the limbs are inwardly connected with the metabolism in general.

When we consider this threefold nature of the human being, we find that the organization described in the last lecture as being mainly connected with the ego has a definite relationship to the metabolic human being in so far as the metabolic human being extends over the whole being of man. The rhythmic human being has a definite relationship to what I designated this morning as the system of heart and lungs. The functions of the kidneys, the forces that proceed from what I called the kidney system, are related to the astral organization of the human being. In short, in his threefold physical nature the human being is related to the individual members of his super-sensible being and thereby also to the individual organ systems, as I showed this morning. These relationships, however, must be studied in more precise detail if they are to prove of practical value for understanding the human being in health and disease. Here we will do best to begin with a consideration of the rhythmic human being, the rhythmic organization of man.

This rhythmic organization of the human being is very frequently misunderstood in relation to one of its definite characteristics, namely the ratio that is established between the rhythm of the blood circulation and the rhythm of the breath. In the adult human being, this ratio is approximately four to one. This, of course, is only the average, approximate ratio, and its variations in individuals are an expression of the measure of health and disease in the human organism. What is revealed in this rhythmic human being as a ratio of four to one continues in the entire human being. We again have a ratio of four to one in the relationship of the development of the metabolic human being (including the limbs—for simplicity's sake I say “metabolic”) to the nerve-sense human being. This can be verified by empirical data, as is the case with other things mentioned in these lectures. Indeed, so far-reaching is this ratio that we may say that all the processes connected with human metabolism take their course four times faster than the work done by the nerve-sense organization for the growth of the human being.

The second teeth that appear in the child are an expression of what is taking place in the human metabolic system as a result of its coming continually into contact with the nerve-sense system. Everything that flows from the metabolic system toward the middle, rhythmic system, set against that which flows from the nerve-sense system into the rhythmic system, takes place in a tempo of four to one. To speak precisely, we may take the breathing system to be the rhythmic continuation of the nerve-sense system and the circulatory system to be the rhythmic continuation of the metabolic system. We can say that the metabolic system sends its effects, as it were, up into the rhythmic human being. In other words, the third member of the human organization works into the second, and this expresses itself in daily life through the rhythm of the blood circulation. The nerve-sense system sends its effects into the breathing system and this is expressed through the rhythm of the breath. Thus in observing the ratio of four to one in the rhythmic human being—for there are some seventy pulse beats to every eighteen breaths—we see the encounter between the nerve-sense system and the metabolic system. This can be observed in any given life period of the human being by studying the ratio of everything that proceeds from the human processes of metabolism in their impact on everything that proceeds from the head system, the nerve-sense system. This is a ratio of exceptional significance.

We may therefore say that in the child's second teeth there is an upward thrust of the metabolic system into the head, but in such a way that in this meeting of the metabolic system with the nerve-sense system the latter gets the upper hand to begin with. The considerations that follow will make this clear to you. The second dentition at about the age of seven represents a contact between the metabolic system and the nerve-sense system, but the effect of the nerve-sense system predominates. The outcome of this collision between what proceeds from the nerve sense system and the metabolic system is the development of the second teeth.

Again, in the period when the human being reaches puberty, a new collision occurs between the metabolic system and the nerve-sense system, but this time the metabolic system predominates. This is expressed in the male sex, for example, by the change in the voice itself, which up to this period of life has essentially been a form of expression for the nerve-sense system. The metabolic system pulses upward and makes the voice deeper.

We can understand these effects by observing the extent to which they encompass the radiations in the human organism that originate in the kidney system and liver-gall system on the one hand, and in the head and skin organizations on the other (everything that therefore forms the nerve-sense system). This is an extremely interesting ratio, one that leads us into the deepest depths of the human organization. We can picture the building and molding of the organism in this way: radiations proceed from the side of the kidney-liver systems, and they are met by the plastic, formative forces proceeding from the head system. If we were to try to draw what takes place schematically, we would have to do it in this way (sketching). The radiations from the kidney-liver system (naturally they do not stream only upward but to all sides) have the tendency to work in a semi-radial direction, but they are thwarted everywhere by the plastic, formative forces that proceed from the head system. We can thus understand the form of the lungs by thinking of them as shaped sculpturally by the liver-kidney systems which are met by the rounding-off forces proceeding from the head system. The entire structure comes into being in this way: radial formation from the kidney-liver systems, and then the rounding off of the radial formation by the forces proceeding from the head system.

In this way we arrive at a fact of the greatest importance and one that can be confirmed empirically in every detail. In the process of man's development, in human growth, two force components are at work: (1) the force components that proceed from the liver-kidney systems and (2) the force components that proceed from the nerve-sense system, rounding off the forms and shaping their surfaces. These two components collide with each other, but not with the same rhythm. They collide with each other in varying rhythms. Everything that proceeds from the liver-kidney systems has the rhythm of the metabolic human being. Everything that proceeds from the head system has the rhythm of the nerve-sense human being. This means that when the human organization is ready for the emergence of the second teeth, at about the seventh year of life, the metabolic organization, with all that proceeds from the kidney-liver systems (which is met by the rhythm of the heart), is subject to a rhythm that is related to the other rhythm, proceeding from the head, in the ratio of four to one. Thus not until the twenty-eighth year of life is man's head organization developed to the point reached by the metabolic organization at the age of seven. This means that the plastic principle in the human being develops more slowly than the radiating principle, the non-plastic principle. In effect it develops four times as slowly. This is connected with the fact that at the end of the seventh year of life, regarding what proceeds from our metabolism, we have developed to the point reached by growth in general (in so far as this is subject to the nerve-sense system) only at the twenty-eighth year.

Man is a thus a very complicated being. Two streams of movement subject to totally different rhythms are at work in him. And so we can say that the emergence of the second teeth, for example, is due in the first place to the fact that everything connected with the metabolism comes into contact with the slower but more intensive plastic principle, so that in the teeth the plastic element predominates. At the time of puberty, there is a predominance of the metabolic element; the plastic element withdraws more into the background, which is expressed in the male sex by the familiar phenomenon of the deepened voice.

Many other things in the human organization are connected with this: for instance the fact that the greatest possibility of illness fundamentally occurs during the period of life before the arrival of the second teeth—the first seven years of life. When the second teeth appear, the inner tendency of the human being to disease ceases to a great extent. The system of education that it has been our task to build up* has compelled me to make a detailed study of this matter, for it is impossible to found a rational system of education without these principles concerning the human being in health and disease. In his inner being, the human being is in the healthiest state during the second period of life, from the change of teeth to puberty. After puberty, a period begins when it is again easy for him to fall prey to illness.

• Referring to the Waldorf education movement, founded in Stuttgart, Germany in 1919, and now a worldwide independent educational movement.

The tendency to illness in the first period of life until the change of teeth is quite different from the tendency to illness after puberty. These two possibilities of falling ill are as different, you could say, as the second dentition is from the change in the male voice. During the first period of life, up to the change of teeth, everything proceeds from, the child's nerve-sense organization to the outermost periphery of the human organism. Everything proceeds from the nerve-sense organization. The nerve-sense organization, which predominates until the change of teeth, is the origin for pathological phenomena in the first period of human life. You will be able to form a general conception of these pathological phenomena if you say to yourselves: it is quite evident here that the radiations from the kidney-liver systems are rounded off, sculpturally rounded off by the plastic principle working from the nerve-sense human being. This plastic element is the main field of action of everything that I have described as being connected with the ego organization and the astral organization of the human being.

Now it may seem strange that I previously spoke of the ego organization as proceeding from the liver-gall system and the astral organization as proceeding from the kidney system, and that I now say: everything connected with the ego and astral organizations emanates from the head organization. We shall never understand the human organization with all its tremendous complexities if we say baldly that the ego organization proceeds from the liver-gall system and the astral organization from the liver-kidney systems. We must realize that in the first period of life, up to the change of teeth, these radiations from the liver system and the kidney system are rounded off by the nerve-sense system. This rounding-off process is the essential thing. Strange to say, the forces supplied to the ego and astral organizations by the liver-gall system and the kidney system reveal themselves as a counterradiation, not in their direct course from below upward but from above downward. Thus we have to conceive of the child's organization as follows: the astral nature radiates from the kidney system and the ego organization from the liver system, but these radiations have no direct significance. Both the liver system and the kidney system are, as it were, reflected back from the head system, and only this reflection into the organism is the active principle.

How, then, are we to think of the astral organization in the child? We must think of the workings of the kidneys as being radiated back from the head system. What of the the ego-organization in the child? The workings of the liver-gall system are also radiated back from the head system. The physical system proper and the etheric system work from below upward, the physical organization having its point of departure in the digestive system and the etheric organization in the heart-lung system. These organizations work from below upward and the others from above downward during the first epoch of human life, and the radiation from below upward works into the radiation working from above downward in a rhythm whose ratio is four to one.

It is a pity that the indications here have to be so brief, but they really are the key to the processes of childhood. If you want to study the most typical childhood diseases, you may divide them into two classes. On the one side you will find that the forces streaming from below upward meet the forces streaming from above downward with a rhythm of four to one, but there is no coordination. If it is the upward streaming forces with their rhythm of four that refuse to incorporate themselves into the human individuality, while the inherited rhythm of the head organization is in order, then we find all those diseases in the child's organism that are diseases of the metabolism, arising from a kind of damming-up against the nerve-sense system in which the metabolism is not quite able to adapt itself to what radiates out from the nerve-sense system. Then we get, for example, that strange disease in children that leads to the formation of a kind of purulent blood. All other children's diseases that may be described as diseases of the metabolism arise in this way.

On the other hand, suppose the metabolic organism is able to adapt itself to the individuality of the child and that the hygienic conditions are such that the child is properly adapted to its environment—if, for example, we feed him in a regular way. If however, as a result of some inherited tendency, the nerve-sense system working from above downward does not harmonize properly with the radiations from the liver-gall system and the kidney system, diseases accompanied by cramp-like conditions arise, the cause of them being that the ego and astral organizations are not descending properly into the physical and etheric organizations.

Childhood diseases, therefore, arise from two opposite sides. Nevertheless, it is always true that we can understand these diseases of the child's organism only by directing our attention to the head and nerve-sense organization. The metabolism in the child must be shaped so that it is brought into harmony not only with outer conditions but also with the nerve-sense organization. In the first period of human life, up to the change of teeth, a practical and fundamental knowledge of the human nerve-sense system is necessary and we must be aware that despite the fact that everything in the child radiates from the head organization, it is nonetheless possible for the metabolism to press too far if the metabolism is normal while the head organization, through hereditary circumstances, is too weak.

Now when the second period of life sets in, from the change of teeth to puberty, it is the rhythmic organism from which everything radiates. The astral and etheric organizations of the human being are essentially active here. Into the astral and etheric organizations between the change of teeth and puberty streams everything that arises from the functions of the breathing and circulatory systems. The reason that the human organization itself can offer the human being the greatest possibility of health during this period of life is that these two systems can be regulated from outside. The health of school children of this age is very dependent on hygienic and sanitary conditions, whereas during the first period of life external conditions cannot affect health in the same way.

Out of a real knowledge of the human being we become aware of the tremendous responsibility resting upon us with regard to the medical aspect of education. We become aware that we may have dealt wrongly with the causes of disease that make their appearance between the seventh and fourteenth years of life. During the elementary school years, the human being is not really dependent upon himself; he is adapting himself to his environment in his breathing, by inhaling the air and by means of all that arises in his circulation through metabolism. Metabolism is connected with the limb organization. If children are given the wrong kind of gymnastics or are allowed to move wrongly, outer causes of disease are cultivated. Education during the elementary school age should be based upon these principles, which should be taken into strictest account in all our teaching.

This is not done in our time, as you can conclude from the following. Experimental psychology—as it is called—has a certain significance which I well appreciate, but among other transgressions it makes the mistake of speaking like this: such and such a lesson causes certain symptoms of fatigue in the child; such and such a lesson gives rise to different symptoms of fatigue, and so forth. And according to the conditions of fatigue thus ascertained, conclusions are drawn as to the right kind of curriculum. Yes—but, you see, the question is put incorrectly, it must be posed in a different way. From the seventh to the fourteenth years, thank God, all that really concerns us is the rhythmic human being, which does not get tired. If it were to tire, the heart, for instance, could not continue to beat during sleep throughout the whole of earthly life. Nor does the action of breathing get tired. So when it is said that we must pay attention to whether more or less fatigue arises in an experiment, the conclusion should be that if there is fatigue at all, something is amiss. Between the seventh and fourteenth years our ideal must be to work not primarily upon the head system but upon the rhythmic system. We do this when we form our education artistically. Then we are working upon the rhythmic system, and we will see that it will be quite possible to correct all the conditions of fatigue arising from false methods of teaching that are being researched today. Excessive strain on the memory, for example, will always exert an influence on the breathing action, even if only in a mild way, and the results will appear only in later life.

At puberty and afterward, the opposite is the case. Causes of disease may then arise again in the human being himself, particularly in his metabolic-limb organism. This is because the food substances assert their own inherent laws, and then we are faced with an overpowering effect of the physical and etheric organisms in relation to the human organization.

In the organism of the very young child, therefore, we are essentially concerned with the ego organization and the astral organization working by way of the nerve-sense system; in the period between the change of teeth and puberty we are concerned mainly with the activity of the astral and etheric organizations, but now arising from the rhythmic system; after puberty we have to do with the predominance of the physical and etheric organizations arising from the metabolic-limb system. We can see how pathology confirms this absolutely. I need only call your attention to certain typical diseases of the female sex; actual metabolic diseases arise from within the human being after puberty, so that we can say that the metabolism predominates. The products of metabolism get the better of the nerve-sense organization instead of duly harmonizing with its activities. In childhood diseases before the change of teeth there is an inappropriate predominance of the nerve-sense system. The healthy period lies between the change of teeth and puberty; and after puberty the metabolic-limb organism, with its quicker rhythm, begins to predominate. This quicker rhythm then expresses itself in everything connected with deposits of metabolism which form because the plastic organization from the side of the head does not meet them properly. The result of this is that the products of metabolism invariably get the upper hand.

I am very sorry that I can speak of these things only in a cursory, aphoristic way, but my aim is to indicate at least the goal of such thoughts, which is to see that the functional aspect in the human being is primary, and that formations and deformations must basically be regarded as proceeding from this functional aspect. This is expressed outwardly in the fact that up to the seventh year of the child's life the plastic, shaping forces work with particular strength. The plastic structure of the organs is developed by the nerve-sense system to such a point that the plastic molding of teeth, for example, up to the time of the second dentition, is an activity that is not repeated. In contrast to this, the permeation of the organism by the metabolism enters an entirely new phase when—as happens at puberty—a portion of the metabolism is given over to the sexual organs. This leads to a thorough change in the metabolism.

It is terribly important to make a methodical and detailed study of the matters I have indicated to you. The results thus obtained can then be coordinated in a truly scientific sense if they are brought into line with what I told you at the end of the last lecture, if they are related to the working of the cosmos outside the human being.

How, then, can we approach therapeutically everything that radiates out in such a complicated way from the kidney system, from the liver system? We simply need to call forth changes by working on it from outside. We can approach it if we hold fast to what can be observed in the plant—I mean, the contrast between the principle of growth that is derived from the preceding year or years, and those principles of growth that stem from the immediate present. Let us return once more to the plant. In the root and up to the ovary and seed-forming process we have what is old in the plant, belonging to the previous year. In everything that develops around the petals we have what belongs to the present. And in the formation of the green leaves the past and the present are working together. Past and present, as two component factors, have united to produce the leaves.

Now everything in nature is interrelated, just as everything is interrelated in the human organism, in the complex way I have described. The point is to understand the relationships. Everything in nature is related reciprocally, and by a simpler classification of these relationships revealed in the plant we come to the following.

In the terminology of an older, more instinctive medicine (which we by no means want to renew; I only mention it so that we can understand one another better), we find constant mention of the sulfurous or the phosphoric. These sulfurous or phosphoric elements exist in those parts of the plant that represent the forces of the present year—in the blossom, not in the ovary and stigma. When you therefore make a tea from these particular organs of the plant (thereby extracting also what is minerally active in them) you obtain the phosphoric or sulfurous aspect. It is totally incorrect to imagine that the doctors of ancient times thought of phosphorus and sulfur in the sense of modern chemistry. They conceived of them in the way I have indicated. According to ancient medicine, a tea prepared from the petals of the red poppy, for instance, would have been “phosphoric” or “sulfurous.” On the other hand, in a preparation derived from a treatment of a plant's leaves (naturally you get totally different results depending on whether you use pine needles, for example, or cabbage leaves for your decoction) we get the mercurial element, as it was called in ancient terminology. This mercurial element is not the same as what is also called quicksilver. And everything that is connected with the root, the stem, and the seed was for ancient medicine connected with the salt-like element.

I am saying these things only for the sake of clarity, for with our modern natural scientific knowledge we cannot go back to older conceptions. A series of investigations should be made to show, let us say, the effects of an extract prepared from the roots of some plant on the head organization, and hence on certain diseases common to childhood.

A highly significant regulating principle will come to light if we investigate the effects of substances drawn from the roots and seeds of plants on the organization of the child before the change of teeth. For illnesses of the kind that are acquired from outside—and, fundamentally speaking, all illnesses between the change of teeth and puberty are of this kind—we obtain remedies, or at least preparations that have an effect upon such illnesses, from leaves and everything akin to the nature of leaves in the plant. I am speaking in the old sense here of the mercurial element, which we meet in a stronger form in mercury, in quicksilver itself, though it is not identical with this substance. The fact that mercury is a specific remedy for externally acquired sexual diseases is connected with this.

What manifests in sexual diseases is really nothing but the intensification of illnesses that may arise in an extremely mild form in the second period of life. The sexual diseases themselves are only a more potent form of what can be acquired externally from age seven to fourteen, until puberty. Before puberty they do not develop into sexual diseases proper, because the human being is not yet sexually mature. If it were otherwise, a great many diseases would attack the sexual organs. Those who can really observe this transition from the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth years, on into the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth years, will see that symptoms that arise in earlier life in quite another way express themselves at this age as abnormalities of the sexual life.

Then there are diseases that have their origin primarily in the metabolism, in so far as the metabolism is bound up with the physical and etheric systems of the human being. These diseases must be considered in connection with the workings of the petal nature of plants.

The cursory way of dealing with these matters that is unfortunately necessary here may make a great deal appear fantastic. Everything can nevertheless be verified in detail. The obstacles that make these things so unapproachable to orthodox medicine are really due to the fact that, to begin with, they all seem beyond the range of verification. This is because we have to reckon with complicated phenomena in the human organism such as the particularly striking example that I spoke about at the beginning of this lecture. I described it in such a way that it appeared irreconcilable with what I said yesterday. This confusion clears up, however, when we see that what proceeds from the liver-kidney organization appears first in its counterreactions, and in this sense it represents something quite essential for the ego organism and astral organism of the human being. In this case it is especially evident, but in a similar way there is a direct cooperation and counterreaction between the rhythms of the blood circulation and of the breathing in man's middle system. Here, too, many an influence that proceeds from the rhythm of the blood must first be looked for in the beat of the breathing rhythm, and vice versa.

Now connect this with the fact that the human organization, for example, really lives in the inner warmth-man, as I said this morning, and that this warmth-man then permeates the airy, the gaseous man. In the forces proceeding from the ego and astral organisms, we then have seen physically something that is working primarily from the warmth organization and the airy, gaseous organization. This is what we have to see in the organism of the very young child. We must see the cause of childhood diseases by studying the warmth and airy organizations in the human being. The effects that appear if we approach the warmth and airy organizations with preparations derived from roots and seeds are caused by the fact that two polar ways of working collide with each other, the one stimulating the other. Substances arising from the seed or root organizations and introduced into the organism stimulate everything that emerges from the warmth organization and the airy organization of the human being.

Through this I merely wished to indicate to you that in the influences working from above downward, so to speak, we can discern in the human being, from the very outset, a warmth-air vibration that is strongest in childhood, although in reality it is not a vibration but an organic structure taking its course in time. What goes from below upward in the physical-etheric organism is the solid and fluid organization of the human being. These two are in mutual interaction, inasmuch as the fluid and gaseous organizations permeate one another in the middle, bringing forth an intermediate phase of the states of aggregation by their mutual penetration, just as there exists in the human organism the well-known intermediate stage between the solid and the fluid. So likewise in the living and sentient organisms we must look for an intermediate phase between the fluid and the gaseous, and again a phase between the gaseous and the element of warmth.

Please note that everything I am expressing here in a physiological sense has a significance for pathology and therapy. When we look into the human being who is organized in such a complex way, we find that one system of organs is continually pouring its influences into another system of organs. If you now study the whole organic action expressed in one of the sense organs, in the ear, for example, you will find the following: ego organization, astral organization, etheric and physical organizations are all working together in a certain way so that the metabolism permeates the nerve-sense being; this is then permeated by rhythm through the processes of breathing, in so for as they work into the organ of hearing; it is permeated by rhythm and organization through the blood rhythm, in so far as this penetrates the organ of hearing. Everything that I have thus tried to make transparent for you in these ways, threefold and fourfold (in the three members of the human being and in the four organizations that I have explained)—all this finds expression in definite relationships in every single organ. And in the long run, everything in the human being is in metamorphosis.

For instance, consider what appears normal in the region of the ear—why do we call it normal? Because it appears precisely as it does in order that the human being can come into existence, can come into existence as he lives and moves on earth. There is no other reason for us to call it normal. But consider now the special relationships that work in shaping the ear by virtue of the ear's position, notably by virtue of the fact that the ear is at the periphery of the organism. Suppose that these relationships were working in such a way that a similar relationship arose by metamorphosis at some other place within the organism, a similar reciprocal relationship to all these members. Instead of the reciprocal relationship that is appropriate to that place within the body, something incorporates itself into this place that wants to become an ear. (Forgive this very sketchy way of hinting at the facts. I cannot express what I want to say in any other way, as I am obliged to say it in the briefest outline. ) For instance, this may incorporate itself in the region of the pylorus, in place of what should arise there. In a pathological metamorphosis of this kind we have to see the origin of tumorous formations. In fact, all tumorous formations up to carcinoma are really displaced attempts at the formation of sense organs. If you penetrate the human organism in the right way regarding such a pathological formation, you will find what part is played in the child's organization—even the embryonic organization—by the organisms of warmth and air in order to bring these sense organs into being. These organs can indeed be brought into being in the right way only through the organisms of warmth and air encountering the solid and fluid organisms, which results in a formation composed of both factors. This means that it is necessary for us to look into this relationship existing between the physical organism (in so far as this expresses itself in the metabolism, for example) and the formative, plastic organism (in so far as this expresses itself in the nerve-sense system). We must see, so to speak, how the metabolic organism radiates out that which carries the substance in a radial way, and how the substance is plastically molded in the organs by what the nerve-sense system carries to meet it.

Bearing this in mind, we shall learn to understand in what way we can really approach a tumor formation. We can only approach a tumor formation by saying that there is a false relationship between the physical-etheric organism on the one side, in so far as it expresses itself in metabolism, and the ego organism and astral organism on the other side, in so far as they express themselves in the warmth and airy organisms respectively. Ultimately, therefore, we have above all to deal with the relationship of the metabolism to the warmth organization in the human being, and in the case of an internal tumor—although it is also possible with an external tumor—The best treatment is to envelop the tumor with a mantle of warmth.(I shall speak of these things tomorrow when we come to consider therapy.) We must succeed in enveloping the tumor with a mantle of warmth. This brings about a radical change in the whole organization. If we succeed in surrounding the tumor with a mantle of warmth, then—speaking primitively—we shall also succeed in dissolving it. This can actually be achieved by the proper use of certain remedies that have probably been suggested to you by our physicians, which are then injected into the human organism. We may be sure that in every case a preparation of viscum (mistletoe), applied in the way we advise around the abnormal organ (for instance around the carcinomatous growth) will generate a mantle of warmth, but we must first have ascertained its specific effect upon this or that system of organs. We cannot, of course, apply exactly the same preparation to carcinoma of the breast as to carcinoma of the uterus or of the pylorus. One must study the path taken by what is produced by the injection, but you will achieve nothing unless you bring about a real reaction. This reaction comes to expression as a state of feverishness. The injection must be followed by a feverish condition. You can at once expect failure if you do not succeed in evoking a condition of feverishness.

I wanted to lead you to this principle so that you could see that these things depend upon a ratio; but the ratio is merely a regulating principle. You will see that these regulating principles can be verified, as all such facts are verified by the methods of modern medicine. There is no question of asking you to accept these things before they have been verified, but anyone who really looks into these things today can make remarkable discoveries.

Although this brief exposition may at first be somewhat confusing, everything will become clear to you if you go into the subject deeply. Everything that I have presented to you today can be verified in a remarkable way if only you take the proper facts that are reported in the literature. These things are reported somewhere, and you need only connect them then with the picture presented today. This is particularly the case if you bring this into connection with something else, with the many comments found in the literature that one can only reach a certain point in these matters and then go no further. Thus you will find confirmation from two sides in existing medicine for what I have suggested sketchily today.

Tomorrow I will allow myself to speak about therapeutic matters, and then things will be clarified further that may not be clear to you today because of the sketchy method of presentation.

In these lectures we are naturally able to present only a few indications as to a method of approach to therapeutic issues, as revealed by spiritual scientific study. The short time at our disposal makes it impossible to enter into details. My own opinion, however, is that at the beginning of the work that it is spiritual science's aim to carry through in the domain of medicine, the most important thing is to make our viewpoint quite clear. This viewpoint has been carefully applied in certain specific details in the preparation of our remedies. It may not be immediately evident how this more general viewpoint can be extended to specific cases, but in describing certain principles of method today I will do my best to suggest thoughts that may help in this direction also.

The human organism in its states of health and disease—or, to say it better for our purpose today, in its states of being healthy and becoming healthy—cannot really be understood unless the so-called normal functions are regarded as being, fundamentally, simply metamorphoses of the functions that must be called into action in order to combat pathological conditions. We must always take into account the fact that the processes within the human organism are different from those unfolding in the outer world. To begin with, we must remember that everything the human being takes into his digestive tract from outside in the plant world, for instance, must be worked through so that man can further enliven it. The process of vitalization, the enlivening, must be an activity of the human being himself; indeed the human organism could not exist without undertaking this enlivening.

We must be clear from the outset that the plant covering of our earth is passing through the opposite process from that which takes its course within the human being. When we speak of a process of vitalization along the path taken by human nourishment through the organism, we have to do with an ascending curve, a curve ascending from the essentially inorganic, as it were, to the state of vitalization—to the living state—and from there to a condition that can be the bearer of sensation and finally to a condition that can be the bearer of the ego organization. When we speak of working through our nourishment up to the point where it is received into the astral organism, to the point where it is received into that which bears the world of sensation, we are speaking about a process of increasing enlivening of what is taken in through nourishment.

The reverse occurs in the plant. In all the peripheral organs of the plant, that is to say in the development of the plant from below upward, in the production of the leaf and blossom processes, we have a process of devitalization, fundamentally speaking. The vitality is preserved for the seed alone. If we are speaking about the initial plant—for the seed in the ovary really represents the next plant that will come into being, that which is stored up for the future plant—if, as I say, we are speaking of the initial plant, vitalization does not take place from below upward. The vitality is sucked up from what is stored by the earth out of the forces of the sun's warmth and light from the previous year. We find the strongest life force in the root nature, and there is a gradual process of devitalization from below upward.

When we reach the flower petals of plants that contain strong ethereal oils in their blossoms, we have an expression of the most powerful devitalizing process of all. Such a process is often connected with an actual working through of sulfur, for instance. Sulfur is then contained, as substance, in the ethereal oil of the blossom, or it is at least near the ethereal oils of the blossom and is actually responsible for the process whereby the plant is led over into the realm of the most weightless inorganic substance—which is still, however, on the borderline of the organic, of the living. It is exceptionally important to realize what we are bringing into our organism when we introduce plant substances. The plant is engaged in the opposite process from that which occurs in the human organism.

If we proceed from this and turn to consider actual illness, we must say to ourselves that the plant element—and it is the same with other substances in the outer world, and to a much higher degree with the animal element—is really opposed to what unfolds in the human organism as a tendency to call forth this or that process. When we look into the process of nourishment in the human being without prejudice, therefore, we must admit that all food introduced into the human organism is something that this organism must utterly transform, reverse. Fundamentally speaking, therefore, all nourishment is the beginning of a kind of poisoning. We must be clear, then, that actual poisoning is only a radical metamorphosis of what arises in a mild form when any food is brought into contact, let us say, with the ptyalin. The further course of the digestion, particularly what is brought about by what I have described to you as the kidney activity, is always a process of eliminating the poisoning. Thus we pass through the rhythm of a mild poisoning and its elimination when we simply eat and digest our daily food. This represents the most mild metamorphosis of the process that arises in greater intensity when a remedy is introduced into the organism. That is why it is nonsense to be fanatical about medicine that is “free from poison.” It is nonsense, because the only point at issue is this: in what way are (we intensifying what already happens in ordinary digestion by introducing something to the human organism that is more foreign to this organism than what we ordinarily digest?

Real understanding of the human organism is necessary before we can estimate the value of an external remedy for this organism. Let us begin with something that is continually present within the human organism as a remedy—the iron in the blood. The iron in the blood continually plays the role of remedy, protecting us from our innate tendency to become ill. I will describe this to you, to begin with, in a primitive way. You know that if our brain were to rest upon its base with its weight of some 1,500 grams, the cerebral blood vessels there would obviously be crushed. The brain does not rest upon its base but floats in the cerebral fluid and, in accordance with the principle of buoyancy, loses as much of its weight as the weight of the volume of fluid displaced. Thus the brain presses on its base with a weight of only about 20 grams instead of 1,500 grams.

This is a fact of fundamental importance because it shows us that the force of gravity is not the determining factor in what underlies the functions of the brain, in ego activity, for instance. This ego activity and also, to a great extent, conceptual activity—in so far as it is not will activity but purely conceptual activity (I am referring now to the physical correlate of this, the brain activity)—is not dependent on the gravity of the substance in question but on the force of buoyancy. It relies on the force that wants to alienate substance from the earth. With our ego and with our thoughts, we are living not in gravity but in levity, in buoyancy. This comes to light in a powerful way when we study the matter.

The same thing that is true for the brain holds good for much else in the human organism—above all, for the iron bearing blood corpuscles floating in the blood. Each of these corpuscles loses as much of its weight as the weight of the volume of fluid displaced. Now, if we live with our soul-being in a force of buoyancy, just think what having more or less of these iron-bearing blood corpuscles must mean for the whole life of feeling, indeed for the whole life of the human organism. In other words, if in a given case there is an irregularity in what is going on in the blood simply as a result of the buoyancy of the iron-bearing corpuscles, we know that iron must be introduced in some way, but in such a way, of course, that makes it possible for the iron to unfold its proper activity in the blood and not elsewhere.

In terms of spiritual science, this means that the relationship of the etheric organism to the astral organism of the human being is bound up with the iron content of the blood. And if you understand how the heart-lung activity leads over into everything that is taken up in the human being in the vitalizing process, and how the kidney activity in turn leads what has been vitalized over into the astral organism, you will not be far from the insight that balance must prevail here. If balance does not prevail, if either the etheric or the astral activity becomes too intense, the whole organism is bound to fall into disorder. You can provide the means, however, of calling forth the appropriate balance, of enabling the organism to lead the necessary amount of food into the domain of the kidney activity, by regulating the iron content in the blood. And by imbuing the actual dynamic element in the blood either with weight or with buoyancy—according to how you regulate the iron content—you regulate the general circulation of blood, which in turn reacts upon the kidney activity. In adding to or decreasing the iron content you bring about an essential regularization of the blood circulation, that is, of the relation between the etheric and astral organisms of the human being.

Now let us take a concrete case. Suppose we have flatulence as a primary symptom. I am choosing a crude example for the sake of clarity. What does flatulence indicate to one who has insight into the human organism? It indicates the presence of aeriform organizations in which the astral organism is working too strongly and that are not being dissolved quickly enough. They are effects of the astral organism—which works, of course, in the gaseous being of man—and they conglomerate instead of forming and dissolving in the regular way. Thus we have a predominance of the astral organization's activity, which expresses itself physically in the airy aspect of the human being. This is what is happening when flatulence is present. Because the astral activity is too strong, it influences the whole activity of the senses, especially the activity of the head. The astral activity becomes congested and does not distribute itself properly in the organism; hence it does not work into the metabolism as it should but recoils on the nerve-sense system with which it is more closely related. We soon find something amiss with the nerve-sense system too—or at least we may assume that we have a complex of symptoms in which the nerve-sense system is not working properly.

Now I must say something in connection with the irregular activity of the nerve-sense system. Physiology really speaks nonsense about this nerve-sense system. Forgive me for saying this—I am expressing myself radically simply so that we may understand each other better. You must naturally take such statements with the familiar grain of salt, but if I compromise too much in what I say we will not find it as easy to understand these things. Supersensible observation of the human organism reveals that any given function that can be demonstrated by sense-oriented empiricism is, from the higher point of view, the sense-perceptible reflection of something spiritual. The whole human organism is the sense-perceptible reflection of something spiritual. But the interaction between the soul-spiritual realm and the physical-organic in the human organism is by no means as simple in the case of the nerve-sense system as is generally imagined.

If you look only at the physical organization of the human being, it is not true—as many people would like to assume—that with the exception of the nervous system and the senses the physical organization constitutes one whole, and that the nervous system is inserted into this structure in order to serve the life of soul separately. It is not usually described quite so radically, of course, but if we come down to the practical considerations underlying the physiological theory, something of this sort comes to light. This is why it is almost impossible today to form any rational opinion of what are often called functional diseases, nervous disorders and so on. There is nothing in the human organism that does not belong to the entire organism and that does not interact with other organs. The rest of the organism is not simply left to its own devices while a separate nervous system is inserted, heaven knows by what divine power, in order that the organism can bear a soul.

If you look for evidence of what I am maintaining here you will find it in a twinkling! The nervous system is primarily that from which the formative, rounding-off forces of the organism proceed. The form of your nose, the form of your whole organism is shaped, fundamentally, from the nervous system. The kidney system rays out the forces of matter in a radial direction, and the nervous system is there to give the organism its forms, both inwardly and outwardly. To begin with, the nervous system has nothing to do with the life of soul; it is the shaper, the form-giver of the human organism, inwardly and outwardly. It is the sculptor.

In the early stages of individual human development, a certain portion of nerve activity that the organism does not use for formative functions separates off, as it were, and the soul element increasingly adapts itself to this position. This is secondary, however. If we notice this separation of a part of the nerve process in very early childhood, and the adaptation of the soul life to these formative principles, then we really get down to the empirical facts. There is no question of the nervous system being incorporated into the human organism as the result of some kind of divine ordinance in order to form the basis for the life of will, feeling, and thought. The nerve-sense life is born through a sort of hypertrophy, part of which is preserved; to this preserved part the activity of the soul then adapts itself, while the primary function of the nerve-sense system is formative. All the organs are shaped from the nerve-sense system.

If you want to verify this empirically, begin by taking the senses located in the skin, spread out over the entire skin—the senses of warmth and of touch—and try to see how the whole form of the human organism is sculpturally formed by these senses, whereas the forms of the special organs are shaped by other senses. That we are capable of seeing is due to the fact that something remains over from the formative force proceeding originally from the visual tract for building the cerebral organs, and then the soul elements we develop in the faculty of sight adapt themselves to this “something” that has been left over.

We shall never have real insight into the human being if we do not realize that as metabolism is going on within us continually, day by day, year by year, our organs must first be provided for by what rays out from the kidneys in a radial direction and is then sculpturally rounded off. The substance that is radiated out by the kidneys must be continually rounded off sculpturally. Throughout the whole span of man's life this is done by the nerve organs that extend from the senses toward the inner parts of the human organism. Higher sense activity, image-forming activity and the like, are simply the result of an adaptation of the soul element to this particular tract of organs.

This should convince us that if the astral organization is working too strongly in the complex of symptoms of flatulence, the excessive astral activity is tending in the direction of the formative forces of the senses. Thus there is a congestion of astral activity in the upward direction and toward the periphery of the human organism; not only do we find congestion, but there are actually gas bubbles that are rounded off still more completely, which are really striving to become organs. In other words as the result of excessive kidney activity, a continual attempt is being made in the upper human being to hold back the ego organization above and to prevent what passes into the organism through the blood from returning in the proper way. Associated with this complex of symptoms, then, we often find cramps that are due to the fact that the astral forces are not passing in the right way into the rest of the organism. If they are congested above, they do not pass into the rest of the organism. In the rest of the organism, then, we notice cramp-like phenomena that are always due to the fact that the astral forces are being held back. By studying inwardly a complex of symptoms of this kind, looking at it with the help of the super-sensible, we can eventually relate what we behold outwardly to what can be beheld inwardly.

Think of it: the astral is held back above, and as a result the entire metabolism is drawn upward; the astral body is not making proper provision for the kidney organs and even less for the stomach; the stomach, which is receiving too little from the astral organization, begins to fend for itself. What you see outwardly is colic and cramp-like conditions of the stomach; cramps may also arise in the sexual organs because they are not properly permeated by the astral organization, or there may be stoppages of the menstrual periods, due to the fact that the ego activity is held back above.

Now let us ask ourselves: how can we influence irregularities of this kind? If you want to be clear about this it is best to realize that the magical names given to illnesses merely serve the purpose of conventional understanding. What is really essential is to see what groups itself together and interweaves the individual symptoms. But we must be able to appraise the importance of these symptoms.

Suppose we are considering the function associated with a flower containing sulfur. If a flower contains a certain amount of sulfur, this means that a process is strongly on its way to the inorganic, a process that is still akin to the organic. If we introduce into the human organism a remedy prepared from such a flower, or even from the sulfur itself, the processes in the digestive tract will be stimulated to greater activity. The stomach and especially the intestinal activity will be stimulated by a decoction of flower petals containing sulfur, because, as I have already said, a process of devitalization that must be reversed is taking place in the plant. The irregularity that has appeared in relation to the kidney activity is indirectly stimulated to a strong reaction, and we have, to begin with, the possibility of counteracting the congestion above by means of a strong counterpressure from below. (The forces working here are for the most part only fleeting in their effect, but if we give temporary help to the organism, in most cases it will begin to help itself.) The astral organization will again be drawn into the digestive tract, as it were, and the result will be a cessation of the attacks of colic and stomach cramps. Of course such a remedy by itself will suffice in only a few cases. It will probably be adequate when the stomach cramps are slight. We must never over-stimulate the organism; whenever it is possible to use a weaker remedy we should avoid a stronger one.

Suppose we encounter a complex of symptoms like the one I have just described. The disturbance being very severe, we will assume that demands are being made on the over-active astral body by an excessive kidney activity. The astral body works with undue strength into the sense organization, which is thereby weakened and undermined in a certain way. It is not really undermined as a sense organization, but the astral organism is working in it so strongly that the formative forces of the nerve-sense organization are drowned, as it were, by the mere activity of the astral organism. The sense organs or the nerve-sense organization in general is not less active, but it does not work in its own characteristic way as nerve-sense organization. It takes on the organization of the astral organism, as it were, and is active in the way that the astral organism is active. This means that it is not performing its form-giving functions properly. We must use a remedy here through which the astral activity is lifted out of the nerve-sense organization. We can only do this if we use a remedy that stands in closest connection with the outer world and that works upon the nerve-sense organization which, as organization within the human being, is nearest of all to the inorganic.

The physiology of the senses is fortunate because in the sense organs there are so many inorganic, which is to say so many purely physical or at most chemical, elements to be explained. Think how much in the eye lies in the domain of pure optics. A great deal in the eye can be depicted beautifully if it is treated merely as a kind of photographic apparatus. In saying this I only wish to indicate that we are coordinated with the outer world precisely through the sense organs, and that in our senses we have channels through which the outer world flows into us by way of the inorganic.

Now when we need to give support to this specific nerve-sense activity, we can do so very well by introducing silicic acid into the human organism, for silicic acid has an affinity for this inorganic aspect at the periphery. We drive the astral organization out, as it were, by means of everything that underlies the silicea, which inclines very strongly, even outwardly, toward the inorganic. When you find silicic acid in a flower, you invariably discover that the flower is thorny, bordering on the inorganic. Thus we can relieve the sense organs by administering this silicic element on the one hand, and on the other hand by supplying the organism with more sugar than it ordinarily has. Sugar, too, is a substance that is worked through in the human organism in such a way that it finally closely approximates the inorganic. Thus everything we introduce by way of sugar relieves the sense organs. If you are able to, you may also strengthen this process by the administration of alkaline salts, which are particularly able to relieve the nervous system of astral activity. These things must be verified by a series of empirical investigations.

Spiritual science thus enables us to arrive at guiding principles. In the activity developed by intuitive knowing, for example, we can see the aftereffects of sugar, particularly in those parts of the human nervous system that run from the central nervous system to the senses; the aftereffects of silicic acid tend toward the peripheral activities unfolding in the senses. These things can all be verified and proven. When a severe complex of symptoms such as I have described is present, it will therefore prove beneficial to administer remedies composed simply of alkaline salts, which work very strongly to relieve the nerve activity of the astral nature, of sugar (not, of course, administered in the ordinary amount but in an unusual one), and, as I have suggested, of silicic acid.

The best remedial effects of these substances will be obtained if you simply administer the roots of camomile boiled in the appropriate way. It may surprise you that I speak of the root, but the different aspects under consideration here intersect, and we must realize that when the symptoms are severe, blossom products are not enough. What we really need is a substance that is still contained in a highly vitalized state in the plant, so that the long process it has to undergo will make the reaction vigorous enough. If we introduce into the digestive tract a suitable dosage of these substances as they are found in the root of the camomile, the reaction in this case will not be strong enough to allow the vitalization to take place at the point of transition from the intestines to the blood; what is contained particularly in the sugar and silicic acid, but also in the alkaline salts, will simply be forced through in an untransformed state. Thus the kidney activity has a chance to absorb it into its radiations, and the substances absorbed in this way are then impelled by the kidney activity toward the nerve-sense activity, which is thereby relieved of the astral functions.

If we really have insight into these matters, if we realize that this way of proceeding therapeutically leads to the most healthy results, much can be discovered. Furthermore, we can very easily be led to other things. We can see how what is absorbed is transformed in the human organization, how the activity of the kidneys sets to work, receiving what is supplied to it by the channels of the blood and radiating it out; we can see how the plastic activity then reacts in its turn. Then we begin to see how this plastic activity in its pure form is restored by the administration of silicic acid, sugar, and alkaline salts. To super-sensible vision, silicic acid, alkaline salts, and sugar, mixed in the right proportions and viewed intuitively, form a kind of human phantom. Something like a phantom is there before us if we picture these substances in their formative force. They are pre-eminently sculptors, these substances; they bear the plastic principle within them. This is evident even in their outer formation through intuitive vision.

The strong effect of silicic acid is due, in the first place, to the fact that when the substance appears in the inorganic realm it has the tendency to shape itself into elongated crystals. The same results attainable with silicic acid could not be achieved with substances that have the tendency to develop into rounder, less elongated crystals. With such substances it might conceivably be possible to cure a hedgehog but not a human being, whose very principle of growth shows tendencies to elongation.

Those who have no sense for this artistry in nature—an artistry through which the organism is shaped, shaped chiefly by the nerve-sense activity—cannot discover in any rational sense the relationships between substances in the outer world and what is taking place in the human organism. Yet there is indeed a rational therapy—a therapy that is simply able to perceive processes that take place in the outer world, that are broken down in the human organism and can then be radiated out by the kidney activity and taken hold of by the plastic activity of the nerve-sense organism.

Let us take another example. Suppose that the radiating action of the kidneys, instead of being too strong, is too weak—that is to say, too little nourishment is being sucked up into the astrality. Everything I described in the previous complex of symptoms is due to excessive working in the astral organism, because it is active particularly in the upper human being and holds itself aloof from the activities of digestion, heart, and lungs. As a phenomenon accompanying this complex of symptoms, we find the formation of phlegm and the like, which is quite easy to understand. Thus in this complex we have to do with an excessive astral activity. Now suppose that the astral activity is too weak. The radiating activity of the kidneys is too weak, so that the astral organism of the human being is not in a position to supply what it should to the formative forces when it penetrates into their domain. The formative force cannot then work itself into the astral organism, because the latter does not reach sufficiently to the periphery. The result is that no active contact is established between the formative force and the force proceeding from the circulation of the food substances and their distribution. The substance is distributed without being taken in hand by the formative force. Not enough of the plastic force is present, and the substance is abandoned to its own life; the activity of the astral body remains too fleeting and does not work properly in the transformation of the substances.

We can certainly regard such a state of affairs as a complex of symptoms. How does it express itself? Above all, what is coursing through the blood vessels will not be absorbed in the proper way by the weak kidney activity, that is, by the astral organization working insufficiently. It collapses, as it were, resulting in hemorrhoids or excessive menstruation. The contact fails, and the metabolism lapses back into itself. In this condition of the organism it is particularly easy for a state of “fever of unknown origin”—as it is called—to arise, or even a condition of intermittent fever.

Now the question is: how can we approach this complex of symptoms? The activity of the astral organism is too weak. We must stimulate the renal activity so that through this activity enough substance may be drawn up into the astral organism. Something occurs now to which I have already pointed. The best thing to do here is to restore the balance between the etheric and astral organisms. Then, simply due to what passes from the digestive tract into the system of lungs and heart, we get the proper transition to the activity. We obtain a kind of balance, and in many cases we can control it precisely by regulating the iron content in the organism, which governs the circulation. This will now stimulate a strong, inner kidney activity, which will be evident outwardly in a change of excretions of urea, both through the kidneys and through the perspiration. This will be quite evident. But of course in many cases we must realize that this balance is always very unstable and that only in the crudest cases will the remedy in question here, which we already bear within us, be of assistance.

In the digestive tract substances containing sulfur in some form are the most effective, and in the nerve-sense system (which we now understand as the formative principle) substances such as silicic acid and alkaline salts are most effective; it is pure metals that are the substances to regulate the balance between gravity and buoyancy. We must only explore how best to apply them in order to restore the disturbed balance in the most varied ways. We begin with iron. According to the complex of symptoms, the most suitable metal may be gold, or perhaps copper. If we determine the form of the disease of the human organism, we will be able to achieve the most important results with the pure metals. If in the interplay between the functions of form-building and breaking down form there is too little form-building and this state of affairs becomes organic—if, therefore, the primary cause of the trouble is that the relation between the heart-lung system and the kidney system is upset—we will achieve the best results with iron.

If as a result of lengthy disturbances in these processes the organs themselves are already impaired, however, and have already suffered because the plastic activity has not been able to reach them—if the organs are already formed incorrectly due to an inadequate amount of plastic activity—we may have to apply mercury. Because mercury already contains the forces of form, the durable metallic drop-form within itself, it has a definite effect upon the lower organs of the human being. In the same way we can discover definite connections between metals and organs of the head that have been attacked and formed incorrectly, for instance when the nervous system itself has been attacked. In such a case, however, we must not confine ourselves to simply setting up a stable balance in opposition to the vacillating balance. This is extraordinarily difficult. This balance is just like a very sensitive pair of scales: we try in every possible way to bring the beam of the scale into balance, but it is very difficult. We shall approach it more easily, however, if we concern ourselves not merely with the beam but with the pans of the scale themselves. We can achieve a state of balance, for instance, by supporting the effect of the iron, introducing something sulfurous into the digestive tract and providing a counteraction in the nerve-sense organism by means of alkaline salts. Then in the middle, rhythmic system of the human being iron will be at work, which in this situation distributes itself beautifully; in the nerve-sense organism potassium, calcium, or alkaline salts will be at work, and in the rhythm of digestion sulfur will be at work. This way of attempting to restore the balance is better.

The remarkable thing is that we find the very opposite in the leaves of certain plants. If, for instance, we prepare the leaf of urtica dioica, the ordinary stinging nettle, in the right way, we have a remedy composed of sulfur, iron, and certain salts. But we must really know how to relate the devitalizing force that is present in the plant to the vitalizing force that is present in the human organism. In the root of urtica dioica, the whole sulfur process is tending gradually to the inorganic. The human organism takes the opposite course and transforms the sulfur by way of the protein in such a way that it gradually brings the digestion into order. The iron in urtica dioica works from the leaves in such a way that in the seed (and thereby in next year's leaves) this plant shatters the very thing that brings together the rhythmic process in the human organism—the process in the stinging nettle is the opposite. In fact, the stinging power of the nettle leaves is this destructive process that must be overcome if the rhythmic process in the human organism is to be regulated. Again, the alkaline salt content of the plant is least of all transformed into inorganic matter. Therefore it has the longest way to go, going right up to the nerve-sense organization; it goes up quite easily because, with the complex of symptoms we are now considering, we know that the kidney activity is asleep, is suppressed. In the human organism we actually have the opposite of what is expressing itself outwardly in the formation of the plants. But there is no need to confine ourselves merely to plant remedies; synthetic remedies may also be prepared and cures effected by combining in a suitable dosage the substances I have characterized.

These are matters that will gradually transform therapy into a rational science, but a science that is really an art, for without art, therapy cannot become a complete science any more than a person who is not an artist can be a sculptor. An individual may have a splendid knowledge of how to guide his chisel and how to mold the clay, but there must always be something leading over into the realm of the artistic. Without this, true therapy is impossible. We must really achieve the right touch—in a spiritual sense; of course—for determining the dosage. This will not suit those who would like to turn medicine into a “pure” science, but it is true nevertheless.

And now let me describe another possible situation. There may be a disturbance of the appropriate interaction between the inorganic element that the human organism produces as a preliminary to leading it over into organic life, and the subsequent intervention of the etheric body, of the heart-lung activity. The older an individual is, the more apparent is this disturbance in human development. In this case the digestive tract and the vascular system are not working together properly. When this happens, we must remember that the consequence will be an accumulation of the products of metabolism. If the substances are not being distributed properly in the organism, the natural result is an accumulation of the products of metabolism. Here we come to the whole domain of diseases of metabolism, from very mild cases to the most severe forms. We must realize that in such cases something is also amiss with the kidney activity due to the fact that because of the preceding congestion the kidneys receive nothing to radiate out.

This gives rise to highly complicated forms of disease. On the one hand the activity of digestion and the kidneys provides no material upon which the plastic, form-giving activity can work, and on the other hand, as the result of a stultification of this plastic activity, we have a disturbance of the organic balance from the other side, so that the plastic force, too, gradually ceases to function. The products of metabolism spread themselves out in the organism but fail, little by little, to be received into the field of the plastic activities and used as modeling material. When this happens, certain metabolic diseases arise that are very difficult to treat. The proper approach to treatment here is to stimulate in the digestive tract, and then also in the heart-lung tract, everything that is akin to elements that are on their way to the inorganic state—akin, that is, to the sulfuric or phosphoric elements in the blossoms of plants, connected with or bordering on the ethereal oils. By doing this we stimulate a renal activity in the organism and thereby help the plastic forces. In this type of disease it is very important to bring influence to bear on the digestive apparatus.

The kidney activity and the excretion of sweat are in a certain sense polar opposites, and they are intimately connected to each other. If the kidney activity is disturbed as a consequence of what I have described, we will always find that there is less perspiration. Great attention should be paid to this, for whenever there is a decrease in perspiration, we may be sure that something is amiss with the kidney activity. When perspiration decreases, what is happening as a rule is that the kidneys operate like a machine that has nothing to work upon but continues to act, while the products of digestion are already congested and are spreading improperly in the human organism. We may succeed in getting the better of these metabolic diseases if we apply sulfur treatments either inwardly or outwardly (for we can work just as well from the skin as from the kidneys themselves). By doing this we may succeed in stimulating the digestive tract to such an extent that it in turn stimulates the heart-lung activity so that material is again supplied to the renal activity; then this material does not lie fallow without reaching the renal activity.

In all these matters, however, we must be quite clear that the human organism does not wish to be absolutely cured but only to be stimulated to unfold the healing process. This is a fact of supreme importance. In the state of illness, the human organism wishes to be stimulated to unfold the healing process. If the healing is to endure we must actually limit ourselves to giving a mere stimulus. A cure that apparently takes place immediately leads much more readily to relapses than a cure that merely stimulates the healing process. The organism must first accustom itself to the course of the healing process, and it is then able to continue it through its own activity. In this way the organism binds itself much more intimately to the healing process, until such time as the reaction again sets in. Before this happens, however, the organism settles down. If the organism can be made to adjust itself to the healing process for a certain length of time, this is the best possible cure, for then the organism actually absorbs what has been transmitted to it in the healing process.

I have only been able to give you certain hints as to method here, but you will realize that with what I call a spiritual scientific illumination of physiology, pathology, and therapy, we are trying to understand that the human being is not an isolated being but belongs to the whole universe. We must also see that with any process taking place in the human being in an ascending curve, let us say, we must seek outside the human being in nature for the descending curve. In this way we will be able to modify curves that are ascending too abruptly, and so forth. Medicine demands knowledge of the whole world in a certain sense. I have been able to offer only a tiny fragment, of course, but this fragment should make clear to you that there must be an entirely different understanding of the nature of urtica dioica, colchicum autumnale, or indeed of any other plant, the plants themselves must tell us where their descending tendency is leading.

When you approach the colchicum autumnale, the autumn crocus, you must understand that the time of year in which it appears is not without significance for its whole structure, for this brings about a certain relation to the vitalizing process. That the devitalization is very slight in colchicum autumnale you can see from the very color of its blossom and the time of its flowering. If you then experiment with colchicum autumnale as a remedy, you will find that the organism must exert itself to a very high level to bring about the opposite vitalization, that is to say—if I may express it crudely—to kill the plant and then make it alive again. Indeed, this whole process unfolds right up into the human thyroid gland. Now you have the basis for a series of investigations with colchicum autumnale as a remedy against enlargements of the thyroid gland.

Let me assure you once again that there is no question here of a wasteful and amateurish abuse of modern scientific methods. Instead we are giving guidelines that will actually lead to more tangible results than pure experimentation. I am not by any means saying that such a pure experimentation cannot also be fruitful. It does indeed lead to certain goals, but with this method a great deal passes by us completely, especially many things we can learn by observing nature. Although it is fine to produce synthetically a preparation composed of iron, sulfur, and alkali, it is good to know how, in a particular plant, all these substances are synthetically brought together in a certain way by nature herself. Even in the production of synthetic remedies we can learn a great deal by understanding what is going on outside in nature.

It would be fascinating to enter into many things in detail, and I think that some of our doctors will have done so in other lectures. A great deal, too, can be found in our literature, and there are many subjects that I hope will soon be dealt with there. I am convinced that as soon as these matters are presented in a clear, concise form and people are not afraid to go straight ahead, they will take this point of view: “I must above all heal if I want to be a doctor, and so I will turn to what appears antipathetic to me at first. If it really helps, I can only try to profit from it as well as from what is to be found in the standard literature.”

I think it would be good if as soon as possible we could produce literature of a kind that would offer a bridge between spiritual science and modern sense-oriented science. It would encourage the opinion that these remedies help, so they cannot after all be such utter nonsense! I am quite sure that when our work is properly in motion, the verdict will be that it does indeed help. And here I will conclude. Try these things and you will see that they help. This too will be significant, for many things that are used in orthodox medicine do not help when they are applied. Everything that we would like to introduce from the viewpoint of spiritual science can unfold in the struggle between what does and does not help.

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.

I would now like to deal with some of the questions that have been put to me, and here there are a few questions that seem to me to be particularly important to you.

The first question is about gonorrhea. Now, in order to understand what should actually be done, it is necessary to study the nature of the disease. It seems to me that in this area in particular, people are all too easily satisfied with simply saying: infection, infection, and more infection. That is, after all, what is actually being said. Certainly, in these and similar diseases there is an extraordinarily great and powerful possibility of infection; but the knowledge of contagion is the very least that can be inferred from the knowledge of the healing remedies. It is not much to know that something is contagious. The only thing one can do is to take precautions to reduce the risk of infection. That is something that is self-evident. But it is good to penetrate into the matter at hand, especially with such things.

Now, we must be clear about the fact that the human organism really is a closed system, and that, to a greater or lesser degree, everything that lies outside of it is poisonous to the human organism. So, in fact, anything that lies outside of the human organism is a poison. There are, however, certain adaptations in which the effect that would otherwise be a toxic effect is, so to speak, isolated. And this isolation of an effect that would otherwise be a toxic effect occurs for the realization of etheric impulses and astral impulses, namely when female and male seed unite. It also occurs in numerous other cases, but especially when female and male seed unite. The effect is eminently toxic when the two polar substances combine. So the effect is eminently toxic, but it is isolated and exposed to the forces of the cosmos in isolation, which can even be described in detail. These are the concentrated forces of the sun and moon, to which what arises from the union is then exposed.

This exposure is only possible if the male and female seed actually interact. With any substance that lies outside the female seed, that is, that is produced in organs that are not the female sexual organs, the male seed gives a useless poison everywhere in the human organism as well as in the outside world. Conversely, the female seed releases a poison that cannot be processed with every substance, except for that which is secreted by the male sexual organ. This poison is actually, basically, only under metamorphosis, sometimes a poison for the oystercatcher, sometimes a poison for the tripper. And with that, we are dealing with diseases that are something essentially different than the syphilis diseases that we have discussed. We are dealing with the production of poisons that cannot endure exposure, either in the human organism or beyond the human organism.

Now, such substances are also, in essence, extremely potent infectious agents. They are, in fact, the carriers of parasites of the smallest kind, hypermicroscopic organisms. And it is with such an effect that we are dealing, that is to say, with an interaction of the astral-etheric organization in the male and female, which then, when it works down into the physical, produces these corresponding poisons. That is the essential thing. The danger of infection is secondary. It is always there precisely because in this way the strongest poisons of all are produced for the organ.

I believe that it is extremely important that such things are understood at last, so that we do not always look at the corresponding symptoms, as I would like to call them, in the same way that the entire reproduction of the human race was once viewed, by tracing the whole human race back to Eve's ovary for all of the Earth's future. This is, of course, a very superficial consideration. It is also an easy way out to say: This disease is infectious; the infectious one has been infected again, and one naturally ends up being vague, but one does not arrive at any real insight. But if one arrives at such an insight, as I have just indicated, then one naturally asks oneself the following question. Then one says: How can we now get at the effect that arises in the human organism under the influence of this poison?

So you have to create something to which you can expose this poison, just as you can expose the fertilized female germ to the universe. So you have to create an atmosphere, so to speak, in the astral-etheric organism, an atmosphere that has a certain absorption capacity, not for the poison, which is then excreted when the poison-producing forces are absorbed in the astral and etheric.

And now it is precisely in such things that the healing powers are often allowed to work together from two sides, and one will really be able to achieve good things in such a case if one takes a preparation, such as some carbonate of alkali, alkali carbonate internally and then applies compresses locally, strong oily eucalyptus compresses locally, but allows both things to work together. This will most certainly lead to a cure, even if it is perhaps slow but thorough. This is because the alkali carbonates essentially work in such a way that they create a special etheric body from the human being's entire etheric body, so to speak; and the eucalyptus extract works in such a way that it flows through this created etheric tract as if it were astral. So that one actually creates an atmosphere around the genital tract that absorbs the poison-producing forces. This is what one can envisage in the process.

Would anyone like to say something about this right now? All these things are not really here to be discussed, but to be tried out. They will prove themselves. Now I would like to address a question that I have found here, and that is:

Can a patient who has become a morphine addict due to severe asthma be successfully weaned, including from morphine, using the remedies citric acid, Prunus spinosa and Nicotiana tabacum, as applied by the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute

in Stuttgart?

With asthma, it is a difficult matter, because asthma is essentially based on the fact that the exhalation, the exhalation current, encounters resistance as it passes through the airways. It gets stuck, so to speak. This is something that can be seen very clearly in the astral organism.

It is always somewhat problematic when recording these things, but you are all anthroposophists and will take the things as they are meant, of course. So, the outgoing air stream, you can actually see something like hooks in the human being's astral body, into which it sticks (see drawing). That is the finding. And that just goes to show that asthma is really the one form of illness that is right on the border of purely psychological illnesses, by which I do not mean so-called mental illnesses, but those illnesses that are related to the psychological life. Mental illnesses do not need to be related to the psychological life at all, but can merely be physical illnesses, in which case the psychological is merely a symptom. So-called mental illnesses should not be called mental illnesses at all, because they are almost always a real organic illness that finds a psychological counterpart, simply a shadow image, and that is merely a symptom. It is best to cure so-called mental illnesses by recognizing from the physical findings as a symptom complex whether there is a kidney disease, liver disease, or a real organic brain disease. By mental illnesses, however, I mean those where, for example, psychological effects really underlie them, such as shock effects or anxiety effects and the like, in other words, where psychological causes are present. And with asthma, it is indeed the case that you often have to go back a long way to find the psychological causes.

When one has grown as old as I have, one has always encountered cases of asthma of the most varied kinds, and I must say that often, when looking for the cause of asthma, one has to go back to the embryonic stage, if one goes back to find the cause of the onset, apart from the karmic one. And the external causes often really lie in the embryonic stage. They lie in the fact that the mother has had shocks or worries that have occurred again and again during pregnancy. Such things have an extraordinarily strong effect on the entire mucous membrane system of the respiratory tract, and it is from this that the causes for what later manifests itself in asthmatic symptoms already go out during the embryonic period.

Now, however, the following is of particular importance for asthmatic symptoms: asthma manifests itself in very different ways, depending on the individuality of the person, and it is very important that we can really fight the other symptoms of asthma that exist in the organism. Then we make the organism strong enough that it can do something itself later to fight the asthma. And so I would now like to indicate the possibilities of how to deal with these matters, since it is indeed an irregular movement of the astral body in the bronchial-lung area.

There is something, I might say, very ingenious at the bottom of it, as asthma is generally a very ingenious disease. If one examines a person suffering from asthma with, if I may say so, occult vision, one finds that in his case, above all, what I might call the inner appetite of the organism is eliminated.

Let us first agree on this concept of the “inner appetite” of the organism. You only come across this concept of the inner appetite of the organism when you observe very young children. They don't just taste with their tongues. I have always said this to teachers: young children do not just taste with their tongues, they taste with their whole organism. The whole organism is something like a fine organ of taste. It is just that later on this tasting is localized around the palate, tongue and so on. But this differentiation, which occurs relatively early, is only a partial one. In subconscious spheres, the human being tastes and thus generates this inner experience of appetite through his whole organism. Simply the whole organism has that striving power that is called appetite.

Now, when there is a loss of appetite in the separate main tract, as is experienced, there is also, and this is particularly the case with the asthmatic to a high degree, a loss of appetite in the organism. And in asthma, the whole organism loses its appetite; it has no desire to absorb the ingested nutrients, especially those that enter the general circulation. He even has an aversion, but he is unaware of it because it is unconscious within, especially towards cooked food. This can be observed quite well from external symptoms that occur in his life. This must be dealt with first. You must first restore the appetite of the organism.

It is generally good to know how to help an organism that you think has lost its appetite, that is, where the right connection between the etheric organism and the astral organism is interrupted, because that means being without appetite. Now it is good to know what is good for it. And it is always good to teach the organism the right dosage of what can be obtained in the form of tannic acid, for example from sage leaves, from nut leaves, from oak bark or willow bark; in short, if one teaches the human organism, I want to say, that which perhaps corresponds to the first decimal place, just only in terms of percentage, of tannic acid. This is what is particularly important for the astral body in such a case. It is stimulated to extend its activity to the ether body when it is supplied with this tannic acid. The ether body, on the other hand, does not react to this. So if you supply tannic acid on one side only, you will only cause disorder. You have to help the ether body on the other side as well. And this can be done, for example, by making a leaf extract from Veronica officinalis, from this speedwell, and extracting the bitter substances from it by name. These bitter substances are found in such plants – they can also be extracted from other plants wherever these bitter extractive substances are found in them — and then you will take one or the other in turn, in the morning one and in the evening the other, for example, and you can then regulate the rhythm between the astral and etheric bodies and in this way initiate the healing. Then you instruct the patient to lie in bed for weeks on end, not to get up at all, but to sleep in a chair, and when he tries to fall asleep, to meditate on breathing in the mind, thus to see or feel in the mind: inhalation, spreading the breath, exhalation, - to breathe quite consciously when he falls asleep; when he wakes up, to let him start breathing consciously again for a few minutes. If you strengthen your moral powers in this way, applying them to your own organism, namely to breathing, but in such a way that you can apply them unwaveringly - in any other position than when sleeping in a chair, especially when lying position, it is quite impossible for the patient to carry it out – and then use this as the third act of the cure, it is to be hoped that the asthma itself can be controlled even in very late stages of development. Morphine addiction is then only a consequence, and this will then be removed. One must try to fight the morphine addiction then.

Now for another interesting case that has been presented to me. However, I would like to emphasize that, of course, it is more or less problematic to give things without seeing the patient in question. It is just that I would like to say that the case can also be constructed ideally, but let us briefly state what is at hand in this forty-five-year-old postal clerk who, as a result of something, has suffered a nervous breakdown, then initially, it seems, became sleepless and ended up in a state where the patient is no longer in control of himself, where the head thinks alone, and is therefore automatic. That was probably the first stage. Then this stage seems to have passed into another, where he developed a trembling of the limbs after two years and probably also convulsive states in the limbs.

The main thing to do in such a case is to know that the whole condition is not located in organs other than those that have a directing effect on the human will system through the ego organization and the astral organization. The will system comes into consideration. And the irregular and abnormal nature of the will system is already evident in this peculiar surrender to the automatism of thought. This has nothing to do with thoughts, but everything with the will that underlies the development of thought. But everything is aimed at working deeply down into the subconscious in order to actually form the will in the mere metabolic-limb-organism, to pull it out of the rhythmic organism, to pull it out of the nerve-sense organism. So the tendency to relocate the entire physical and etheric will organs to the lower organism is actually present.

You would certainly have been able to observe this tendency in such a case, had you had the opportunity to observe this postal clerk, let us say, from some point in time and again after two years. You would have noticed that the reciprocal relationship between the lower lip and the upper lip had changed during these two years. Two years ago, it would have seemed to you that perhaps a certain, not quite harmonious relationship had taken place in the movement of the upper lip to the lower lip, that one has the feeling that it does not fit together as it does in normal people, and after two years it will have become stronger. The lower lip will have continued its naughty movements more than the upper lip. You will be able to observe such things. You will also be able to observe such an interrelationship between the legs and arms in discordant movements.

Now, in such a case, a combination of a drug treatment, a physical treatment, let us say, with a spiritual treatment in eurythmy therapy should be considered. These two things must be combined here, and this case is actually typical of this.

In such cases, use comfrey baths with a fairly strong addition of comfrey, which you can then count on for silicic acid. Comfrey has a very high percentage of silicic acid, so use comfrey baths and you will be able to achieve a significant strengthening of the ego organization through these comfrey baths. But it is only there under the influence of the bath. There is a constant danger that it will disappear again after a short time. It is driven towards the tendency to be something lasting if you now have eurythmy therapy vocalization, simply vocalization, after the bath has run its course, for an hour of eurythmy therapy vocalization. That is what you are stimulating then, which was initially only predisposed in the equisetum bath. And then you can hope, in this way, to fight the matter, above all from the periphery, from the limb organism. You just have to try to find the point from which you can fight the matter.

Now I have been somewhat concerned with this other case, which is very interesting; it is just not clearly presented. It says here:

Lupus-like, increasingly severe proliferation of the mucous membrane on the palate, causing difficulty in swallowing, in a thirty-seven-year-old female patient who had pulmonary tuberculosis seven years ago, second and third degree, but who has now largely recovered. She had an operation for gallstones that were not present.

I would like to know what happened immediately after the operation on gallstones that were not present!

Suffers from disorders of the digestive tract, from flatulence, which is beneficially influenced by eurythmy therapy S-exercise and has been minimal lately; has been suffering from severe grief for years. Could a successfully performed I-exercise have caused the lupus disease? What should be done?

Do you really think that this is something lupus-like?

It could also be scurvy; it just looks like that.

You don't have to assume that. In reality, it can only be that the plastic power of the etheric organism simply does not work sufficiently into the peripheral tracts. It cannot be anything else. And this would have to be remedied by simply injecting bee venom in perhaps a sixth decimal potency and making the process a total one, which arises from the fact that the bee venom very strongly stimulates the etheric body to take up the astral forces in a way that is truly directed towards the whole human organism.

The underlying organizing principle of the spiritual, bee venom, is at the root of it all again. So that, when it comes to seeing that the organic effect is, so to speak, breaking down at the periphery, and does not want to enter into the periphery, you can always do a great deal of good with bee or wasp venom, and then support the effect of the injection from within by making a liquid pulp of honey and milk, and then giving that as a daily nutritional supplement.

This is something that really presents itself in such a way that one sees that the organism, which has become cramped and shows such abnormal phenomena at various peripheral points, in turn spreads its effect on the one hand, under the influence of the insect poison that enters the circulatory system, and on the other hand, under the influence of that which is substantially related to milk and honey, develops and spreads in the organization. That is what I believe can be recommended in such a case.

Now I would like to talk about the question that, as it seems, is also close to your heart. This is the question of nervous diseases, spinal cord diseases and so on.

Of all nervous diseases, spinal cord diseases are of course the hardest to treat. The other nervous diseases are much more treatable. But one would be able to treat the so-called nervous diseases much more if one considered that in the nerve, in the nerve cord, in the nerve at all, there is a substance that continuously tends towards crumbling. Unlike other parts of the organism, the nerve contains no constructive, sprouting or growth forces. Instead, the nerve contains everywhere that which tends towards the ego organization, in that it actually always wants to separate and crumble. It just has to be continually prevented from crumbling. In the moment when the ego organization is not strong enough to prevent the nerves from crumbling, then the most diverse phenomena actually arise. Depending on whether it is the ego organization or the astral organization that is not strong enough, either the actual nervous diseases arise when the astral organization is not strong enough, or when the ego organization is not strong enough, the various neuralgias arise, or the various conditions with semi-psychic symptoms, and so on.

Now we have to be clear about how to act on the nervous system in such a way that a kind of phantom of the astral and ego organisms arises in the nervous system. This really occurs when one attempts to get the forces – that is, when there is an already severe nervous disease, not a partial one – the silica effect into the whole nervous system. This is, so to speak, something of a postulate, to get silicic acid into the nervous organization.

Now, if there are no particular obstacles or inhibitions, you get the silicic acid into the nervous system because there is an extraordinarily strong affinity between the form of the human nervous system and the arnica substance. This is already very strong. And if you give arnica injections, especially in high potency, of course, in the fifteenth, twenty-fifth, even thirtieth potency, you will find in most cases that the arnica injection works in such a way that the sick person then even gets the urge and drive to do something against his nervous state. For it must always be brought about that the patient suddenly realizes: whatever is in the nerves is relieved by some remedy, and I can now use my ego organization, my astral organism. In this case, it is a matter of relief. In a nervous patient, the ego and astral organisms are intensely occupied with the nervous process. Something must be introduced into the nervous process that imitates the ego organization and the astral organization. And that is precisely what the remarkable configuration in Arnica does. Arnica is, after all, a mixed compositum of all kinds of things, and it is truly a kind of microcosmic imitation of all kinds of macrocosmic things. The Arnica substance does this to a very special degree.

Just think of everything that happens. First of all, there is the silicic acid that is found in Arnica montana. This is the basic substance. It is extremely sensitive, a deeply significant reagent for all possible cosmic influences. Silicic acid is an extremely fine reagent for everything that affects the earth. Then there is always a tendency in Arnica montana to transfer these fine silicic acid perceptions of the cosmos, one might say, and to shape them plastically in the potash salts and also lime salts, which are distributed in Arnica montana in a wonderful way.

Now imagine the whole effect that I described earlier for tannic acid; this effect on the astral organism is also present in arnica. So that what is now brought in from the cosmos is, as it were, plastically imprinted in the potassium calcium salts by the silicic acid, and directly carried into the organism through the tannic acid content of the arnica. Then, as if by a miracle, the arnica substance simultaneously develops a sedative so that the person does not feel the disturbing effect of the penetration of foreign substance into the physical correlate of the astral body. This is because the arnica substance contains something camphor-like. So it contains its own sedative. Then the arnica substance, wonderfully embedded in rubber and similar substances, contains protein substance, which gives it an affinity to the etheric body. And then we have phosphorus inside, namely essential oils, which builds the whole thing up in such a way that it directly becomes a phantom of the human ego-organism. |

Therefore, if you introduce the correct dosage into the organism – but by injection, the other things will not work as strongly by injection – a substance from Arnica montana, you will usually see that, at least initially, there is a strong influence on the nervous system. The right process will be there when you can see how the patient now feels stronger and believes that they can now conquer the problem on their own. This feeling must be evoked. If it does not come, then take the help of Arnica montana, alternating with that which now supports him by also boosting the effect of Arnica montana from the respiratory side, so alternate with a fairly high-percentage formic acid injection. You will see that then the thing can occur.

If you cannot manage that, then it is of course necessary to take an extract of the part of the nervous system of an animal in which the actual source of the disease can be found, depending on whether it is in the brain or in the spinal cord, and then inject this in high potency instead of formic acid in alternation with arnica. So, for example, if you suspect that the nerve disease originates in the visual area, then take the secretion from the four-hilled substance or such a substance of an animal, extract it, take it in a fairly high potency and inject it to support the Arnica montana. Let the support go exactly where it is needed. These are things that one must always observe.

However, a mild toxic effect may occur, especially when Arnica montana cures are successful – it should even occur – that can be observed in something. But you will always see that this mild toxic effect can be counteracted by per os alkalis in some combination. I believe that what I have described here is actually very important for what should be done in the case of nervous diseases, including spinal cord diseases, which could only be diagnosed in the right stage, and in which one should get rid of that medical impudence that is so rampant, especially in Western Europe, that one attributes almost all cases of tabes dorsalis to some kind of syphilitic cause. It is complete nonsense. And if you obstruct your own view from the outset, you will naturally not be able to come to terms with your view. Most of the diseases of the spinal cord do not at all arise from any syphilitic starting points, but from colds that appear harmless to most people, in the gastric or other abdominal tracts, or from the fact that the spine itself has been exposed to a cold. It is just that, well, of course, according to the well-known social conditions of the last decades, the purely external complication of syphilis and spinal cord disease occurred very frequently, and the view was then distracted by this, and one did not do the right thing, namely to fight the consequences of syphilis on its own and those of spinal cord disease with something like what I have just described. It should always be considered and treated as a nervous disease, as I have just described.

Now the interesting thing is that if you localize the nerve disorders in the digestive tract or even in the stomach and they do not go further beyond the digestive organs, you can achieve the same thing – and this is extremely interesting – if you take Chamomilla instead of Arnica montana and treat it in exactly the same way by injection. And this is interesting because you can see from this – because chamomile is almost completely lacking in silica – that silica is only necessary when you get beyond the digestive tract with the nerves. It lacks silica. On the other hand, it contains sulfur, which is particularly beneficial when it comes to stimulating the etheric body in the digestive system.

Now some questions have arisen, but we don't have more time to deal with things in depth: “What is the essence of short-sightedness and long-sightedness?”

Don't you think it's worth asking whether these things could be therapeutically influenced? The causes of these lie on the palm of your hand, and you don't ask about these things. You mean, how can they be therapeutically influenced, whether they can be cured by mere medical remedies? It will be possible to cure them, both short-sightedness and long-sightedness can be cured, and thus also prevented, because you are quite right, glaucoma is of course essentially connected with long-sightedness. People who are not clear-sighted do not easily develop glaucoma. But a medicinal cure, which is indeed possible, will only be successful if it is initiated perhaps even before the age of three. So you have to notice the tendency towards short-sightedness or long-sightedness in the child very early on. Then you can do a lot with highly potentized belladonna. But you actually have to notice it before the child has fully learned to speak and walk. Once the organism has reached the stage of physical development that it has reached, once it has learned to walk, stand and speak, the entire tendency towards the formation of the crystalline lens and the vitreous body, which underlie hyperopia and myopia, is already present. And because it is something purely mechanical and formal, it is difficult to do anything. On the other hand, as long as the eye can still be affected by the unformed, wriggling movements, the as yet unoriented arm movements and so on in the child, and this is achieved by a highly potentized belladonna, which is imbued with a certain feeling, a certain sensation, one might think that something can be done. But it will probably not be easy to make his observations. That is to be said about it.

Now, unfortunately, we have to conclude these considerations. I hope that we will continue them again at a suitable time. It will always give us a very special satisfaction here if we can, so to speak, insert into the announced medical college activity that we can give the doctors something when they come to such meetings. I hope that in the future this can always be achieved in some way or other. But it will also be possible for those friends who stay in touch with the Dornach School to receive answers to their questions about these or those things from time to time – we will make sure that this is done in the right way. So if you send questions to Dr. Wegman, we will provide answers together, although not in the supplement to the 'Goetheanum', of course, but in a form that can only be sent to the doctors. But I believe that we should set it up so that when someone asks a question, the answer should always go to our anthroposophical doctors, because it is always actually interesting for everyone and we will make the most progress this way. We will try to initiate communication with the doctors here in Dornach in a corresponding way.

Dr. Palmer: Dear Dr. Steiner, I hope you will allow me to express my colleagues' and my own heartfelt thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule over Christmas to devote a few hours to us. We who work at the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute in Stuttgart know how much we need these hours, and we would ask you to continue to support us with your advice and assistance.

The only thing I would have liked would have been just that it could have been more hours. But however much we thought about it with Dr. Wegman, it did not result in more than these three hours. As I said, it would have been my wish that it could have been more hours; but hopefully another time! Hygiene as a social issue.