The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Question: I was very surprised by the idea that the sun was inside the earth; I have never heard of anything like that before. As I understood the last lectures, the earth was nothing more than the human being, and that animals actually descended from all this. How do you explain this in contrast to the idea that humans descend from apes?

Dr. Steiner: I am very pleased that you asked this question, because we can make a lot of progress by answering it.

If you take today's human head as it is, what do you find about this human head? First of all, from the outside inwards, you will find this human head covered from top to bottom by a fairly hard, bony shell. Yes, gentlemen, if you take this bony shell, which is thin in relation to the whole head, and compare it with what you find, for example, when you go into the Jura mountains, you will find a very remarkable similarity. You see, the bony skullcap is essentially made of very similar components to the calcium deposits, the calcium crust that you find when you go into the Jura Mountains.

Now, you generally find such deposits on the earth's surface. Of course, in these limestone deposits, you couldn't exactly grow fruit very well. But that can be done in a layer that doesn't consist of limestone, but rather of arable soil, and that is laid over the limestone soil.

Now, gentlemen, you will have already realized: When one speaks of nature, one must touch on everything. And you know, of course, that the human head, at least on the outside, is also covered with a skin that even sheds scales, so that the skin lies over the calcareous skullcap, over the external skull. If one studies this skin in turn, it bears a great similarity to what field soil is. The hair grows in the scalp. The hair, in turn, bears a great similarity to what grows as plants out of the soil. If you draw it schematically, pictorially, we can actually say: at certain points on the earth, there is a lime deposit on top; above that is the soil, and plants grow out of the soil. In humans, we have this calcareous shell on the outside, with skin over it, and hair grows out of the skin.

Now you remember something else. So, curiously enough, I can draw something similar when I draw the earth or the human head. But now you remember that I told you something else. I told you that if you go deeper into the earth and study what is there deeper in the earth, you will find remains of ancient creatures, of ancient animals and plants in the earth. I have told you what these animals and plants used to look like. Ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and so on, were quite large creatures. But if we now go into the inside of the human head, what did I tell you? I told you: the white blood corpuscles swim in the blood, and these are actually also small animals. Inside the human head, these small animals are constantly dying, are, so to speak, half dead, and are only brought back to life at night, but they are on the way to dying. And the further you get into the head, the more the head dies. Under the skullcap, between the brain and the outer bone, is a kind of dead skin. So that when you go into the head, you also find something that is dying.

So we can say: When a person dies, and you take his head apart afterward – which is what science does, of course, since it doesn't like to deal with living people, but rather with dead people on the dissection table – yes, gentlemen, there you have these dead brain cells, which are actually fossilized blood cells, and on the outside the hard shell. In this respect, the story is very similar to the earth. So we cannot say anything other than: when we enter the actual brain through this hard cerebral membrane - it is even called the 'hard cerebral membrane' because it is already completely dead - we see petrification all the time. On earth, these petrifications can be found everywhere. If we look at the earth today, we can see that it resembles a dead human head. It is, of course, only smaller. The earth is larger, so everything looks different. The earth resembles a dead human head. So anyone who studies the earth today must actually say to themselves: the earth is an enormous human skull, and one that has died.

Now, gentlemen, you will never be able to imagine that something can have died if it has not previously lived. That is not true. Only science claims that. But I think you would consider yourself stupid if you found a dead human head somewhere and said: It just formed out of matter. You will never say that, but you will say: This thing that looks like this must once have belonged to a living person, it must once have been alive; because what is dead must once have been alive. So that if someone reflects on it rationally, if he studies the earth today and finds a dead human head, he must naturally imagine – otherwise he would simply be, I would say, stupid – that it once lived, that the earth was once a living human head, that it lived in the universe, as man lives on earth today.

Now, the human head, it could not live, could not possibly live if it did not get its blood from the human body. The human head alone, it can only be shown for fun. When I was a little boy and lived in the village, sometimes such wandering troupes would set up and put up a booth. When you walked by, someone would always come out: Ladies and gentlemen, please enter, the show is about to begin! Here you can see a living, talking human head!” They showed a living, talking human head. You know, that's done with all kinds of mirrors so that you don't see the body, only the head. But otherwise, of course, there is not only the head, but it must receive its blood and everything that nourishes it from the human body. So the earth must once have been such that it could have nourished itself from outer space. Yes, could one also give reasons for the earth really having once been something like a human being and being able to nourish itself from outer space?

Much thought has been given to how it actually came about that the sun - I showed this recently - was once connected to the earth. But that was a long time ago. Since that time, the sun has been outside the earth and gives the earth light and warmth. Even the warmth that is inside the earth itself comes from the sun, it just remains stored in the winter. Now we can calculate exactly how much heat the sun gives off each year. It is a great deal, and physicists have done just such calculations. There are millions and millions of calories. But, gentlemen, when doing this calculation, the physicists were really frightened, because although they found out how much heat the sun emits each year, they also found out that if this were correct, the sun would have cooled down long ago and we would all have frozen to death. So the calculation is done correctly, but it is still wrong. That happens. You can calculate, something can be calculated in the most beautiful way, but the calculation is still wrong, precisely because it is so beautiful.

Now there was a physicist, a Swabian, named Julius Robert Mayer, who actually had some very interesting ideas in the mid-19th century. This Julius Robert Mayer, who lived in Heilbronn in Württemberg, was a doctor and made his discoveries in a similar way to Darwin on his trip around the world, namely by making very interesting observations during a trip to southern Asia, on the islands there, how human blood looks different due to the influence of heat than in somewhat colder areas, and he came to interesting facts through these observations. He then summarized these observations and wrote them down in a very short essay. He sent it to the most important German scientific journal of the time. That was in 1841. And this scientific journal sent the essay back to him because the people said: This is all insignificant stuff, amateurish, stupid. Today, the same people, that is, their successors, of course, see it as one of the greatest discoveries of the 19th century!

But the editors of the “Annalen für Physik und Chemie” (Poggendorff's “Annals of Physics and Chemistry”), which was the most famous German scientific journal at the time, not only sent this essay back to Julius Robert Mayer, but they also locked him up in an insane asylum! Because he was really very enthusiastic about his science - it's not quite right, but he was very enthusiastic about his science - he behaved a little differently than other people - after all, they didn't exactly know the same things as he did - and his fellow doctors and other doctors noticed this, and that's why he was put in an insane asylum! So you come up with a scientific discovery that comes from a person who was locked up in an insane asylum for it. If you come to Heilbronn in Swabia today, you will find a monument to Julius Robert Mayer on the most important square there. But that was done afterwards! It's just an example of how people deal with people who have such thoughts in their heads.

Now, you see, this Julius Robert Mayer, who thought about this influence that he knew from heat on the blood, also thought about how the sun can produce heat. The others just calculate how much it gives off. But Julius Robert Mayer also asked himself: Yes, where does it all come from? — What does physics do? One would like to say that physics calculates in the same way as one would calculate with a human being: he once ate and now he is full, but in addition, something is stored in his own fat and muscles. If he can't eat anymore, he takes it from his fat and muscles. And he can live like that for forty or sixty days, but afterwards he dies if he doesn't get anything to eat. The physicists have also calculated what the sun produces every day after it has miraculously generated this heat. How it ate at that time was not considered, but in any case, it was calculated how much it produces.

But where it gets that from, that was asked by Julius Robert Mayer. And he found out that every year so many celestial bodies fly into the sun that are like comets. You see, that is the food of the sun. But if we look up at the sun today, we can see that it has a good stomach, it eats an enormous number of comets every year. Just as we consume our Mitrag's meal and thereby develop our warmth, so the sun develops warmth by eating comets into its good stomach.

Now, gentlemen, that means: When the comets have already been completely fragmented and are falling down, they are indeed hard iron cores, but only the iron falls down. Man also has iron in his blood. If a man were to dissolve somewhere and only the iron were to fall down, people would probably say: There is something up there that has been glowing, and it is made of iron. Because the meteorites into which comets disintegrate consist of iron, it is said that comets are made of iron. But that is nonsense, just as it would be nonsense to believe that a person is made of iron because they have iron in their blood and you would find a very small lump of iron there. That is just how meteorites are found; they are disintegrated comets. Comets are something quite different; comets are alive! And the sun is alive too, it has a stomach, and not only eats comets but feeds itself just as we do. There is iron in our stomachs too. When you eat spinach, you don't realize that it contains a lot of iron, in general, of course. Nevertheless, it is good to advise people with anemia to eat a lot of spinach, because it helps their blood absorb iron much better than if you simply put iron into their stomachs, which usually passes through the intestines.

If the comets were only made of iron and fell into the sun, you should just see how it all comes out again! You would see a completely different process. You would probably have to build a giant toilet in space if that were the case! Of course, the situation is quite different. Comets are only made up of a small percentage of iron; but the sun eats them.

Now think back to the time when the Earth itself once had the Sun inside it. Then the Sun did the same as it does now, alone; then it also devoured comets. And now you have the reason why this giant head, which is the Earth, was able to live: because the Sun provided its nourishment. As long as the Sun was with the Earth, the Earth fed from the Universe through the Sun, just as we now feed from the Earth through our nourishment system.

So it was already taken care of that the earth, when the sun was still with her, could feed herself. Of course, you have to imagine that the sun is much bigger than the earth, and that therefore the sun, while it was inside the earth, was actually not inside the earth, but the earth was inside the sun. So you have to imagine it like this (see diagram $. 176), that at that time the sun was here, the earth was inside it and inside the earth, in turn, was the moon. So: sun, in the sun the earth and in the earth the moon. In a sense, it was the other way around than with humans. But with humans it only appears that they have a small stomach; the small stomach alone could not do much. The small stomach that man has – we will talk about this later – is related to the outside world everywhere. Actually, man is inside the earth, just as the earth was once inside the sun. And the actual earth's stomach was then the center of the sun. If that is the sun (see drawing), that is the earth, then the stomach was here (in the middle), and the sun just pulled these comets in from everywhere and then handed them over to the stomach, so that the digestion of the earth did happen inside the earth after all.

Now you can say again: This is contradicted by the fact that the human head does not digest itself. — That is quite right. But history has also changed. The human head does digest a little, after all. You see, I have described to you: When we eat food, it first comes to the tongue, to the palate. There they are first mixed with saliva containing ptyalin, and then they go down the gullet. But not all food goes down the gullet, for basically the human being is a column of water — everything is soft, only the solid parts are stored away — so that some of the food is absorbed in the mouth in the head. Direct nourishment goes from the palate into the head. That is how it is. You can see that things are not as crude as one usually believes, you can see that simply by comparing. You cannot expose a human egg to the air to hatch it externally. You can do that with a bird's egg. It is exposed to the air and first hatched on the outside. It is the same, of course, with the human head, in a similar way. The human head today could not nourish itself from the little nourishment it gets from the palate. But the earth was organized differently. It had a stomach within it, which was also a mouth, and it nourished itself entirely from this mouth. So we can say: As long as the sun was connected to the earth, this huge being had the possibility to nourish itself from the universe.

But now I have told you: if you study the earth today, it is like a dead human head. Yes, a dead human head, but it must have lived once. So the earth must have lived once. It nourished itself through the sun.

Now, gentlemen, I will tell you something else. You see, if you look at the human germ in the womb at a certain time, that is, after fertilization, I mean two, three, four weeks after fertilization, this human germ looks extraordinarily interesting. First of all, in the mother's body, all around the mother's body, which is called the uterus, there is a membrane that has many blood vessels. And the blood vessels that are inside the mother's body are not there, of course, when a child is not being carried. These blood vessels are connected to the other blood vessels that the mother has. They go into the blood vessels everywhere. So the mother has connected this sphere to her own blood system (see drawing) and while the blood usually circulates in the body, the blood also flows into this sphere, only into the outer sphere.

Now, gentlemen, inside this sphere you will find all the organs. For example, there is an organ that looks like a sack, and next to it there is another one that is a smaller sack. These blood vessels also continue into these sacks, which are not there at all when the mother is not carrying a child, because the whole sphere is then missing; these veins also continue into it. So we can say: These veins go in everywhere and everything I have drawn for you so far is there when the child develops in the first few weeks; it is there and the child hangs on to it very small, tiny, here. It hangs on to it very tiny!

And strangely enough, if I were to draw you a large picture of the child now, as it is in the near future, I would have to draw it like this: the child is almost just a head, with the rest of it tiny. You can see that I have drawn two little stumps like that, which will later become the arms. The legs are almost non-existent. But instead, these two pockets that I have drawn sit on the child, and the blood vessels go into these two pockets. And these blood vessels bring nourishment, and the head is nourished. A stomach is not there yet, and neither is a heart. The child does not have its own blood circulation in the first few weeks. The child is just a head. And that grows and grows gradually so that it becomes human-like in the second or third month, that the other organs are added. But the child is still nourished from the outside, from that which is there as pockets. And then food is stored all around (it is drawn). But blood is supplied. The child cannot breathe yet, it only gets air indirectly through the mother. The child is actually a human head, and the other organs are not yet of much use to it. It cannot do anything with the lungs. It cannot do anything with the stomach. It cannot eat yet; so it must get all its nourishment only in such a way that its head is nourished. It cannot breathe yet. It does not yet have a nose either. The organs are developing, but it cannot use them yet. So the child in the mother's womb is a head; only everything is soft. The later brain is terribly soft in here, very soft and terribly alive, very much alive. And if you could take a giant microscope and look straight at a child's head, which for all I care is from the second or third week after fertilization, it would look quite similar to what I told you about the earth as it once was, when the ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs and so on waddled around. It would look very similar, only different in size.

So that one can say: Where can we find a picture of the Earth as it once was, today? In the human head, when the human head is still unborn and exists as a germ. This human head is namely a clear image of the Earth.

And everything that needs to be there, these pockets on the body, what is around it, is thrown off as the so-called afterbirth after it has become very brittle, and the person remains, is born. So from what is thrown off as the afterbirth, you actually get the nourishment as a child in the womb – the afterbirth consists of the shredded blood vessels. These so-called allantois and amnion – these shredded organs – are extremely important to us while we are in our mother's womb, because they replace the stomach and respiratory organs. But when we no longer need them, when we are born, can breathe and eat for ourselves, they are thrown off as afterbirth.

Now, gentlemen, when you look at something like the one I have drawn for you, all you have to do is imagine: There would be the universe, here would be the Earth, and in there the human head and all around, very fine, the sun (see drawing $. 177). And now comes birth, that is, what was once there ceases. The sun and the moon fly out, and the birth of the Earth is there. The Earth must help itself.

There are two things that can be described. First of all, I could describe to you the earth as it once looked like – there were ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and so on. But now I could just as easily describe the human germ. Everything is smaller, but I would have to say the same thing. So today you could say: the earth was once the germ of a giant human.

It is extremely interesting that in earlier times people knew more than later people in a remarkable way - we will talk about that later. The later people have mostly learned from the misunderstood Hebrew document, from the misunderstood Old Testament, and they imagined, not true: there was the earth and somewhere the paradise, and there is the finished Adam in the paradise as a little nipper. This idea that people have formed from the misunderstood Old Testament is about as accurate as if someone today were to imagine: Man does not come from the little thing that is there from the allantois and amnion sacs, from this skin and so on - man does not come from that, but all that is a thing in itself; but in the mother's womb there is a tiny flea, and from this little flea comes man. That's about it when you imagine: The Earth was there, Adam and Eve lived on it like fleas, and afterwards the human race. This is precisely what has arisen from a misunderstanding of the Old Testament, whereas those who knew something in ancient times did not speak of Adam, but of Adam Kadmon. And Adam Kadmon is something other than Adam. He is this giant head that the Earth once was. And that is a natural conception. This Adam Kadmon only became an earth flea when people could no longer imagine that a human head could become as large as the earth, when they no longer believed in it, and so they formed the abnormal conception, as if it were there for fun, that the whole nine months in the mother's body go by, and that the human being is born from this motherly sphere.

In reality, we have to imagine that man was once the whole earth – the whole earth. And the Earth was much more alive. But, gentlemen, it is no different; you see, if I draw you the Earth today, it is a dead being, just as the human head is dying, and if we go back to this human head, which is in the mother's womb, it is alive through and through. It is as the Earth once was. And the Earth died today. But once it was alive through and through.

You see, if people could hold everything that science provides together, they would come up with many things. Science is all right, but the people who administer today's science cannot do much with science. If someone looks at the earth's surface today, they have to say: It's like a dead human head. We are actually walking on a dead body that must have lived once. I have told you that; but I will also tell you everything that follows from it.

Now, during my youth in Vienna, there was a very famous geologist, that is, a student of the earth. He wrote a great book: “The Face of the Earth.” It says that today, when we walk over the soil of Bohemia or Westphalia, we walk over dead things. That was once alive. - Science already suspects the details, but it cannot put the things together. What I am telling you does not contradict science anywhere. You can find confirmation of it everywhere if you follow the scientific evidence. But the scientists themselves cannot get out of it, which follows from the facts.

So we really come to say: the Earth was once a giant human. That's what it was. And it died, and today we walk around on the dead Earth.

Now, you see, there are important questions left over, two important questions raised by Mr. Burle's question. One is this: if we go back, we see that the Earth was a giant. Where did the animals come from? And the second question is: the Earth was a giant. How did it come about that man is now such a small flea on the Earth? How did it come about that he became so small? These two questions are indeed important questions.

The first one is actually not that difficult to answer; you just have to answer it not out of all kinds of fantastic gimmicks, but you have to answer it out of the facts.

Yes, gentlemen, just imagine that the Earth was once a human head like this in outer space and died. Are you surprised that all kinds of creatures came out of it? They still do today. If you take that into consideration, you have the origin of animals. You can still observe that today.

That is the one question. We will talk more about how the individual animal forms came about. But in principle, you have to assume that the animals must be there. I can only touch on this question today; I will answer it in detail later.

Now the other question remains: Why is man such a little shrimp today? Well, there you have to take everything you can know. First, you can ask: Yes, but once a human being lived in space, who died and is now Earth. Did he not give birth? Did he not reproduce? — There is no need to go into this question any further; if it did multiply, then the others in space were called to do so at that time. So we need not be interested until a certain point of multiplication occurs.

Yes, gentlemen, if you still follow how a small cell multiplies today, it is like this at first (see drawing), then it is like this, then two come from it. Then each becomes two; that's already four. And so the whole human body is built up, so that in the end it consists of nothing but small individual critters living in the blood and dead in the head, all coming from a single cell. Thus, from a part of the original earth, just as today man is not only born out of a whole human being, but out of a part of a human being - today's earth came into being. The only question is: why can't they get out anymore? Because the Earth is no longer connected to the universe in the same way as it was when the Sun was inside it. Now all these beings remain inside. They were illuminated from the outside by the Sun when the Sun went out, whereas before it was inside. — You have to take everything you can know.

Gentlemen, but perhaps you know that dogs, which generally speaking are a certain size, below which they do not go, but can be bred to be so small that they are sometimes almost no larger than large rats. If you give the dogs alcohol to drink, for example, they stay small – it depends on what affects the being and how big it becomes –; however, these dogs become terribly nervous.

It was really the case – even if the whole world was not full of alcohol – that the effects of the substances had become quite different when the sun had left the earth. When it was still in the earth, there was a completely different effect than later, when the sun was out. And while man was at first as big as the earth itself, he became small through this huge effect. But that was fortunate for him, because when he was still as big as the earth, all the others who were born had to fly out into space. We will hear later what happened to them. Now they could stay inside the earth because they can walk around on the earth together. And now, instead of one person, the human race came into being because people remained small.

Yes, gentlemen, it is true: we all descend from one man! That is, after all, understandable, isn't it. But this one man was not a little earth flea, as people are now, but he was the earth itself. When the sun came out, the earth died on one side, and the animals crept out, as they still do when something dies. And on the other side, the forces remained. Only now they were not stimulated from within by the sun, but from without, and man became small and could become many people.

So the fact that the sun works from the outside makes people small. You can easily understand that. Just imagine that the Earth is this small (I will draw the Earth very small now) and in the past the Sun was where the Earth was inside, so all the forces radiated out from there, and when the Earth moved, the Sun always moved with it; they were one and the same (see illustration on the left). Now that the sun is outside, the story is like this: there is the sun and there is the earth, which goes around the sun. When the earth is there, it receives these rays; when it is there, it receives those rays (drawing on the right). They only ever see a small section of rays on plate 9. When the sun is outside, the earth receives only a few rays. When the sun was still inside the earth, the whole effect of the sun still came from within. No wonder that when the sun orbits in this way, it can illuminate a person at every single point on the earth, whereas before, when it was inside and had to radiate from the center, it could only illuminate one person. When the sun began to work from the periphery, it reduced the size of the human being.

It is really interesting that not only the Asian scholars, when the Old Testament had long been misunderstood and interpreted as it was later interpreted, still spoke of the Adam Kadmon, who is actually a human being who is the whole earth, but the ancestors of the present-day Central European people, who are everywhere, in Switzerland, in Germany, they had a legend that said: The Earth was once a giant human, the giant Ymir. And the Earth was fertilized.

So they talked about the earth in the same way that we have to talk about a human being today. And of course this was no longer understood later on, because the place of these indeed pictorial, correct images from legends – they are terribly true – because the place of these true images was taken by the false Latin interpretation of the Old Testament. So the ancient Germans here in Europe – it was figurative, as if they had dreamt, but the dream was much more correct than later, when the Old Testament was misunderstood and instead of speaking of the whole earth, of the Adam Kadmon, one spoke of the little Adam – still had an old, albeit merely dream-like, figurative science.

Yes, you get a huge respect for what has been eradicated, old, but only dream-like pictorial science. But it was there, and it has been eradicated. It does not need to be surprised. In a certain time this general extermination just came. And if I were to tell you what once existed, for example, in Asia Minor, in the Near East, in North Africa, in Southern Europe, in Greece, Italy – yes, gentlemen, in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd century, when Christianity already existed, you could find strange statues everywhere in Asia or Africa when you walked in the fields; they were everywhere. And in these statues, people who could not yet read or write expressed what it once was like on Earth. From these statues one could have studied what it once was like on Earth. It was in the form, as expressed in the sculpture, that the Earth was once a living being.

And then people just got this rage, this anger, and in a short time everything that was present in such statues was simply taken away. A huge amount was destroyed, from which a huge amount could have been taken. What is still found today of ancient monuments is the least important, because in the first centuries, people knew well which was the more important. That was shaved off.

So it is true that humanity once had wonderful knowledge; but they just dreamt it, these people. And you see, it is an extraordinarily interesting fact that people once actually dreamt on Earth instead of reflecting, as they have to do today. They actually did it more at night than during the day. Because everything you learn from the older wisdom of people is interspersed with the fact that you can see that these people observed a lot at night. The shepherds in the fields observed a lot at night. And this old wisdom was present among the Germans, among the Germanic peoples, in that they spoke of a giant human. And later there was still a giant human. Man really did not suddenly become smaller. And in the end he became just as people are now.

From this point, gentlemen, we will continue our discussion when I am able to visit you again. Such a question always provides the stimulus to talk about a great deal. I must now travel to Germany again, to Stuttgart. After that, we can continue our discussion. In the meantime, prepare some very nice questions. I will then tell you when the next hour will be.

Good morning, gentlemen. Today we will add to what we have heard on previous occasions so that we will be better able to understand the full dignity of the human being.

I have explained roughly how nutrition and breathing work in human beings. We also talked about how closely connected nutrition is with our life and that it is essentially a process of taking in substances that are then lifeless in our intestines. These substances are then re-enlivened by the lymph vessels, and in the process they are transmitted into the blood. There this living nourishment encounters the oxygen of the air. We take in air. The blood changes. This process occurs in the chest, and it is this process that gives us our feelings.

Thus, life actually originates between the processes in the intestines and those in the blood. In turn, in the blood processes, that is, between the activities of the blood and the air, our feelings come about. Now we have to deal with the human mind as well and try to understand how it developed.

You see, understanding the external aspect of the mind has become possible only in the last sixty years. Last year, in 1921, we could have celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of this possibility. We did not, because in our time people are not very interested in celebrating purely scientific anniversaries. The discovery made in 1861 we could have celebrated sixty years later, was an important scientific discovery. It is only in the last fifty or sixty years that this matter can really be talked about. I remember it because it is just as old as I am. The discovery I am speaking of is the following.

I told you the other day how we can observe human beings. We do not need to experiment; all we need to do is pay attention to how nature experiments with people whenever they have any kind of illness. If we know how to look at what happens to the physical body when a person becomes ill in any way, we discover that nature herself arranged such an experiment for us and that we can gain insights from it.

Well, in 1861, when Broca dissected brains of deceased people who had speech impairments, he discovered that they had had an injury in the third convolution on the left side of the brain.

You know, don't you, that when we remove the top of the skull, we can see the brain? This brain has convolutions. We call one of them the temple convolution because it is located near the temple. Well now, in every person suffering from speech impediments or. muteness, there is some damage in this left convolution of the brain. This injury happens when someone has a so-called brain stroke. What happens in that case? The blood, which normally flows only through the vessels, is forced out through their walls and enters the tissue surrounding the vessels, where it should not be. Such a hemorrhage produces the stroke, the paralysis. In other words, whenever blood flows into the wrong place, into this convolution of the brain, it ultimately disables this temple convolution completely and prevents the person from speaking.

This is an interesting connection: Human beings can speak because they have a healthy left convolution of the brain. We must now understand what it means when a person has a healthy left convolution of the brain. But in order to grasp this, we need to look at something else first.

When we examine this same area of the brain in small children who have passed away, we find that this portion constitutes a fairly uniform, mushlike substance, especially at the time before the child has learned to speak. As the infant gradually learns to speak, more and more small whorls develop here. They continue to form in an artful way. In other words, the left cerebral convolutions in the child who has learned to speak or in a fully grown adult are artfully structured.

Clearly, this means that something happened to the brain while the child learned to speak. And we should not think about this any differently than we think in ordinary life. You see, if I move a table from there to here, nobody would say the table moved itself this way. It would be just as wrong for me to say that the brain has formed these convolutions by itself. Instead, I must think about what has actually taken place and what caused it. In other words, I must ask why the left temple convolution developed this way.

You see, when children learn to speak, they move their body. In particular, they move their speech organs. Before that, when they could not yet talk, they were merely fidgety, cried, and so forth. As long as the child is only able to cry, its left convolution of the brain is still a “mush,” as I described it. The more the child learns not merely to cry but also to turn this crying into individual sounds, the more this convolution receives definite shape. As long as the infant simply cries, there is only brain mush in this area. When the child begins to utter sounds, this uniform mush is transformed into the artfully structured left portion of the brain we can see in healthy adults.

Now, gentlemen, the matter stands like this: When children cry, the sounds they utter are mainly vowels such as A (as in “father”) or E (as in “gate”). When they merely cry like this, they do not need a developed left cerebral convolution; the children utter these sounds out of themselves, without having anything artful developed in the brain. If we pay some attention, we will discover that children initially make A sounds; later on they add those of U (as in “shoe”) and I (“bee”). Gradually, as you know, they also learn to utter consonants. First they form the sound A; then they add M or W and say MA or WA. In other words, out of their crying children gradually manage to form words by adding consonants to the vowels.

And how do they form these consonants? All you need to do is to pay attention to how you pronounce, for example, an M. You'll see that you must move your lips. When you were a child, you had to learn this through imitation. If you say L, you must move your tongue. Thus, you must always move some organs. From mere fidgeting the child must progress to regular movements, carried out by the speech organs in imitation. The more the child moves beyond the vowels formed in mere crying and utters consonants such as L, M; N, R, the more the left cerebral convolution is structured in an artful way.

Now we could ask how children initially learn to speak. They learn to speak only through imitation. They learn to speak, to move their lips, by imitating out of their feelings the way other people move their lips. All of this is imitation. This means that children take in, see, perceive what happens around them. And this perceiving, this mental activity, forms the brain. Just as a carver shapes a piece of wood or a sculptor works on marble and bronze, so the child's movements “sculpt” the brain. The organs the child moves carry their movements right into the brain.

If I want to pronounce L, I have to use my tongue. The tongue is connected with the brain through nerves and through other organs. This L penetrates into my left cerebral convolution and produces a structure there. In other words, the L produces forms in which one section joins the next, resembling the intestines. The M produces spherical convolutions. So you see, these sounds work on the brain.

The movements of the organs the child activates through observation are at work here in the brain. It is very interesting that since it became known that a brain stroke damages the left cerebral convolution, thus destroying the ability to speak, it became possible to know that the formation of vowels and consonants by the child continuously works on this convolution. This in turn is based on the fact that the eyes and other sense organs perceive what takes place in the world around us.

And what happens in the world around us? Well, you see, whenever we speak we are also breathing. We breathe continuously. And in this process, every breath first enters the human body, moves up the spinal column and enters the brain. This means that even while the child is crying—though as yet unable to pronounce consonants—this breath moves up and enters the brain.

What is actually entering the brain in this process? Well, blood, of course. As I explained to you in the last few days, blood flows everywhere. Through our breathing, blood is constantly being pushed into the brain. This activity begins the very moment we are born and even before, except then it occurs in a different manner. Anyhow, when we are born, we begin to breathe. This intake of air begins, which then pushes blood into the brain.

Thus we can say that as long as the baby's breathing merely pushes blood into the brain, it can only cry. Children begin to speak when not only blood is forced into the brain, but when they also perceive something through their eyes or any other organ, especially the ears. In other words, whenever they see another person move, children inwardly repeat this movement. At this moment not only the bloodstream goes up to the head, but another stream goes there as well, for instance, from the ears—the stream of the nerves.

In the left cerebral convolution, like everywhere else in the human body, blood vessels and nerve fibers meet. The latter are affected by what we observe and perceive. The child's movements in uttering consonants reach the left convolution, that of speech, via the nerves. This area is structured by the combined effect of the breathing, which is carried there by the blood, and of whatever activity comes in through the ears and the eyes. In other words, blood and nerves together structure this brain mush beautifully. Thus we see that, at least in this particular region (and it will later be found to be the same way in others), our brain is actually structured through the combined activity of perception (via the nerves) and of the constant intake of breath, which pushes the blood into the brain.

At this point, we need to understand also that this is how the child learns to speak, that is, by developing the left cerebral convolution. But, gentlemen, when you dissect a corpse, you will find that the right convolution of the brain, though symmetrically placed, shows relatively little structuring. On the one hand, we have the left convolution, which is beautifully formed, as I said before. On the other, we have the right one, which throughout life usually remains the way it was in the young child, that is, unstructured. I could say, if we had only the right convolution, we would only be able to cry. It is only because we so artfully structure the left convolution that we are able to speak.

You see, it is only when a person is left-handed and habitually tends to do most of his work with the left hand that, strangely enough, he will not lose his capacity for speech even when his left side is affected by a stroke. Dissection will reveal that in the case of this left-handed person, the right convolution of the brain was structured in the same way as the left convolution of right-handed people normally is. Movements of arms and hands, then, have a strong bearing on the formation of the brain.

Why is that so? You see, this comes about because when a person is used to doing a lot of things with his right hand, he does not merely do them with this hand, but he also gets into the habit of breathing a bit more strongly on the right side, of exerting more of an effort there. He also gets into the habit of hearing more clearly on the right side, and so forth. All of this merely points to the fact that the person in the habit of using his right hand develops the tendency to be more active on that side than on the left.

When a person is right-handed, the left convolution of the brain is structured; when he is left-handed, the right convolution is structured. What is the reason for this? Well, gentlemen, when you look at the right arm and hand and the head and the left cerebral convolution and then examine where the nerves are, you will find that there are nerves everywhere in the human body. If you did not have nerves everywhere, you could not feel warm or cold. These sensations have to do with the nerves. You have nerves everywhere in your body.

They go up the spine and reach right into the brain. But the remarkable thing is that the nerves coming from the right hand lead into the left portion of the brain, and the ones in the other hand are connected with the right side of the brain. This is because the nerves cross. Yes, the nerves cross in the brain. For instance, if I do a gymnastics exercise or a eurythmic movement with my right hand or the right arm, I sense the activity through this nerve, but I become aware of it in the left half of the brain because the nerves cross.

Let us now imagine that a child prefers to do everything with the right hand. Then the child will also breathe a bit more strongly on the right side and will also hear and see a bit better on that side. The person will make greater efforts on that side and through his movements develop something that reaches into the left side of the brain. Now you only need to imagine that we have the habit of making certain gestures while speaking, such as Ah! (corresponding gesture); or if we reject something: Eh! These gestures are perceived by our nerves. Now, the movements we make with the right hand while speaking are experienced by the left side of the brain.

By the same token, those of us who are right-handed have the tendency of pronouncing vowels and consonants more strongly with the right half of the larynx. Again these activities are taken in more vividly with the left side of the brain. This is why the brain, originally more like mush, is now a lot more structured. In contrast, we use the left side of our body much less, and that is why the right half of the brain is less developed and remains mush. However, when someone is left-handed, the opposite process takes place.

These facts lead to important conclusions for education. Just think, when you have left-handed children (you will have a few of them), you must tell yourself that whereas all the others have a very artfully developed left convolution of the brain, in the left-handed children the right convolution is structured. When I teach writing, I use my right hand. In this activity, the right-handed children will merely reinforce what they have begun to develop in their left brain convolution when they began learning to speak. However, if I now force the left-handed children to write with their right hand, I will destroy the development that learning to speak has produced in their right cerebral convolution. Yes, this development will be destroyed.

Since left-handed children are not supposed to write with their left hand, my task is now to gradually direct everything previously carried out by the left hand to the right one. This way they will initially learn to do simple things with the right hand and get into writing much more slowly than the other children. But it does not matter if they learn to write a bit later. If I simply were to make left-handed children write as fast as the right-handed ones, I would make them less intelligent because I would ruin the development that has taken place in the right side of the brain. Therefore, I must make sure to treat left-handed children differently from right-handed ones when I teach them to write. This approach will not make them less intelligent in later life, but more so, because I gradually transform their left-handedness into right-handedness, instead of merely getting their entire brain confused through making them write with the right hand immediately. If you want to affect the entire human being through writing and force this change to the right hand, pedagogically speaking, you would achieve the very opposite of what you are striving for.

Nowadays we find a widespread tendency of teaching people to do everything with both hands. This is how we really get their brains mixed up. This tendency of making people do the same thing both with the right and the left hand merely proves how little we know. Mind you, we can strive for such an ideal, but before we could realize it, we would have to change something. Gentlemen, we would first have to change the entire human being! We would slowly have to shift activities from the left side to the right and then gradually reduce them on the right. What would happen then? You see, what would happen is that, below the surface, the left cerebral convolution would be more artfully formed; but on the outside, it would remain mush. The same would happen to the right convolution. Instead of distributing two activities between the left and the right sides, we would develop each convolution into an outer and an inner half.

The inner portion would be more suitable for speech; the outer one would exist merely in order to add the vowels and consonants in crying. However, speech is a combination of what happens in crying and in articulating. This remains the same throughout life.

You see, we cannot just tinker with human beings and their development. In education, even in the lower grades, we need an understanding of the entire human being. For with everything we do we change the human being. The really criminal thing is that nowadays people monkey around considering only superficial things and ignore the inner effects of what they do.

Actually, very few people have both sides of the brain fully developed. Usually the right convolution contains more blood vessels, whereas the left one has fewer and instead is more permeated with nerves. This holds true for the human brain generally; the right side carries more blood, and the left is more used for perceiving.

Once we realize that the brain is shaped under external influences, we can appreciate how important these influences from the outside are. We see that they are tremendously significant once we understand that they affect everything that takes place in the brain. Also, out of the understanding of what occurs in the brain when we speak, we can get an idea of how the human brain works.

You see, when we examine it further, we discover that there are always more blood vessels on the outside wall of the brain than inside it. Thus we can say that the exterior part of the brain contains more blood and the interior more nerves.

Let us now consider a child learning to speak in the ordinary way, a right-handed child. How is the brain of such a child being formed? First of all, the brain of a young child is surrounded by a layer or coat, so to speak, of blood vessels. Then nerve tracts begin to form. Because of this, gentlemen, because of these nerve tracts in there, the inner brain substance appears whitish when you take it out and look at it. However, when you take out the brain matter surrounding it, it looks reddish-grey because it contains so many blood vessels.

Now what happens in this region when the child learns to speak and consequently the left cerebral convolution is structured accordingly? What takes place, you see, is that the nerve bundles, as it were, gradually extend more toward the inside and less in the area where the blood system expands. In other words, in children who develop normally the inner part of the brain shifts more to the left and the remaining portion follows. The brain thus moves to the left side, where it turns ever more whitish. It shifts that way. All of human development is based on such artful details.

Now let us talk some more about speech. You see, there are languages that have many consonants and others that contain many vowels such as A, E, I and so forth. In some languages people squeeze out the sounds, like S, W, so that one barely hears the vowels. What lies behind all this?

We know that languages differ in different regions of the earth. What does it mean when someone lives in a certain area where people focus more on the consonants? It means that he or she experiences the outer world more, for the consonants are formed in the experience of the surroundings. Therefore, in people living more in the physical world the white portion of the brain shifts more to the left. In people experiencing life more inwardly, people living in a region where things are experienced more inwardly, the white brain matter does not move quite so far to the left. These people will tend to utter melodious vowels. This varies with the regions of the earth.

Let us now assume the following, gentlemen: Let's imagine the earth and people standing at various points on the earth. And one person, let us say, is given a language rich in vowels and another one a language rich in consonants. What must have happened in their respective regions? A lot may have happened, quite a lot, but I want to focus on one thing that may have taken place. Imagine that we have high mountains and a level area, a plain. Picture then steep mountains on one side and a plain on the other. Now, wherever there are flat regions, we perceive that the language people speak there is richer in vowels. Wherever there are steep mountains, the local language tends to be richer in consonants.

But you see, this matter is not so simple after all, because we must ask how the mountains and the plains came about. This is the way it is: We have the earth, and the sun shines upon it. At one time our entire earth was unformed mush. The mountains first had to be pulled out of this mush. All right then, the earth was basically mush and the mountains were pulled up out of this mush.

Well, gentlemen, what was it that pulled the mountains up? The cosmic forces that work out there did. We can say that there are certain forces of a cosmic nature that pulled up these mountains. In some places the forces were strong and developed mountains; in other places there were weaker forces coming in out of the universe that did not produce mountains. In this latter area the earth crust was not pulled up so strongly in primeval times. And the people born on those parts of the earth crust less affected by these cosmic forces use more vowels. Persons born in areas more strongly influenced by the cosmic forces use more consonants. We see now that the differences between languages are connected with the forces of the entire universe.

Now how can we support such a claim? Well, gentlemen, what we have claimed here must be considered in the same way we look at clocks to check the time. We look at the clock to see if we must start working or if it is time to leave. But we never say, “Now this is too much! This awful minute hand is a terrible fellow who whips me on to work.” We wouldn't dream of saying that. All the clock does is tell us when we have to go to work, and so we cannot blame it for having to work, can we? In this case, the clock is completely innocent.

Similarly, we can look up to the sun and say that when we stand here at a certain moment, the sun is between us and the constellation of Aries. That is the direction where these strong cosmic forces work from. It is not Aries itself, of course. This constellation merely indicates the direction where the strong forces come from. If a person is standing in a different place at that same time, he or she is affected as follows: When the sun has moved to that place, it is in Virgo, let us say. The forces coming from this direction are weaker. Instead of going through the entire process now, I can therefore say that when someone is born in an area where at a certain time, let's say at his birth, the sun is in Aries, that person will tend to use more consonants. However, when someone is born with the sun in Virgo, he will tend to use more vowels.

You see, I can read the entire zodiac like a clock from which I can see what happens on earth. But I must always keep in mind that it is not the constellations that cause these events; they are only indicators. From this you can see that the zodiac can tell us a lot, even about the reasons why the languages on earth differ.

Now, let us look at the earth and imagine that we put a chair out there into space and look back at the earth. Of course, this is only possible in our imagination and not in reality. When we look from our chair in space at the various languages on earth, as in a sort of language map, then we get a certain picture. When we then turn the chair around and look out into the universe, we get a picture of the stars. And the two pictures match.

If we study the Southern Hemisphere and the languages there and then turn the chair around and examine the southern firmament, our experience is entirely different from the one we would have if we did the same thing in the Northern Hemisphere. This means that we could draw a map of the starry skies above us, and from our study of the connection between the stars and language we would then be able to tell which language is spoken under a particular constellation.

You see now that as soon as we begin to observe human spiritual life, for example, the formation of our minds through speech, we must look up to the stars in order to understand anything. The earth alone does not give us an answer; you can think about why languages are different as long as you like, but based on the earth alone you won't find an explanation.

If you want to know what takes place in your stomach, you must examine the earth, the soil below. If a region grows mainly cabbages, you will understand that people there must constantly re-enliven in their metabolism the heads of cabbage pulled out of the soil. In other words, if you want to know what people in a certain area eat, you must examine the soil. If you are interested in how people breathe in a particular region, you have to study the atmosphere. And if you want to know what happens inside the skull, in this brain of ours, you must look at the position of the stars. You always have to see the human being as an integrated part of the entire universe.

You see now that it is indeed mere superstition to say, “Whenever the sun is in Aries, such and such takes place.” This kind of statement is not worth anything. However, if you understand the full context, the matter ceases to be superstition and becomes science instead. And that will lead us from understanding the transformation of substances to an understanding of what is really happening and its connection to the vast universe out there.

Dr. Steiner: Good morning, gentlemen! Have any of you thought of something you would like to ask me?

Question: Concerning the political situation, is Britain sincere in its dealings with Germany, or is it actually conspiring with France to destroy her? On the one side stand the French trying to suppress Germany with reparations, and on the other stand the big capitalists. It is the same with Russia. We know that Germany has made a trade agreement with her, but now we learn that France, too, has made one. Was this done to sabotage the German agreement? Are you perhaps in a position to make a few remarks on these and other German affairs?

Dr. Steiner. Well, gentlemen, perhaps this is the reason why lately we have been more inclined to speak about scientific matters than to discuss political problems. It is much wiser to do so for the simple reason that all these affairs you have touched upon lead to absolutely nothing. In reality, nothing at all can come of them. Just look at the present situation. Basically, none of the protagonists know where they're heading; everything they do is done from fear, is really a product of fear.

Other things are much more important than all these matters that are based, for example, on England's not knowing how to act. England cannot turn her back on France because in England the opinion prevails that promises must be kept. It is the general attitude over there that a person is obliged to keep his promises. But to what extent this notion is sincere—well, that's something that has nothing to do with the actual conditions. Sincerity pertains only to individual human beings. In regard to public life the most we can say is that a kind of basic principle is acknowledged: “Promises must be kept.” One must play the game by the rules of fair play. Therefore, England quite naturally takes the position that she cannot desert the old Entente, but this stand contradicts the whole purpose of the war. That whole undertaking was calculated to shift industrial production toward the West and to suppress the economies of Eastern and Central Europe, to turn these areas into markets. This was, in fact, the original intention. The economy of Central Europe—and the same would have eventually held true of Eastern Europe as well—was much too prosperous to suit people in the West; they simply didn't want things that way.

Now, this opinion in England exists side by side with another. If Germany is totally suppressed, a needed export market is lost. On the other hand, the French, above all else, feel their lack of money and purchasing power. Their only objective is to squeeze profits out of Germany by hook or by crook. You can understand now that the English sit between two chairs and, as a result, don't accomplish much of anything. If one thinks that Germany at some point has been hurt too much, then a little something is done here or there to brighten the general outlook a bit.

In the affairs of the Middle East, England and France are right now in sharp confrontation. England must push back the Turks because she wants to dominate the world. Granted, the English are protecting the Christians, but the sincerity of their motives is something we needn't consider. At the moment, France is not interested in that cause. First and foremost, the French want an influx of money, and for this reason they support the Turks. In the Middle East, then, these two powers are squared off. Basically, world politics everywhere are in a state of chaos today.

Added to all this is something else especially evident in England just now. With this we come to an important issue, and many people should realize its importance. Incidentally, all the things said over there carry no weight whatsoever. What Lloyd George or anybody else says, matters not in the least; it is all at variance with the facts. Of course, it isn't done consciously; people imagine they are talking about the issues, but in fact they are by-passing them. Another matter, however, is of much greater significance. In England, Lloyd George is the centre of a controversy. Should he or should he not remain in office? Now, why is the position of such a man, who can express himself most eloquently in public, so precarious? Quite simply, he no longer has strong party support; his backing is minimal. Yet, what would happen if Lloyd George were replaced? The minister taking his position would himself soon be ousted. Lloyd George has to be retained solely because he has no qualified successors. The crux of the matter is that everywhere we must settle for individuals whose past performances are a matter of public knowledge, because people can no longer discern whether or not candidates are competent and have a real grasp of the issues.

Not even the Social Democratic Party can find capable men anymore. It just continues to support the old guard and shuts the door against aspiring younger members. Because everywhere people cannot recognize human ability, graybeards, who have lost the faculty to comprehend the present situation, are being kept in office. This is why nothing is accomplished anywhere! So today it doesn't matter what party a person joins to receive this or that position; what matters is that we bring about an environment from which individuals arise who have insight into existing conditions and whose speech and actions are based only on facts. Men's awareness for what is required diminishes daily. Comments like, “Well, it would be better if the English did this, the French that, and the Germans and the Turks thus and so,” are so much idle chatter. Whatever is done merely from the standpoint of the past cannot succeed.

Take an issue of the last few days. You'll agree that Germany has suffered greatly from speculation in foreign currency. Even schoolboys have bought foreign money and have “made it” in foreign exchange. Somebody with 50 marks one day could buy foreign currency and have 75 the next. Huge sums of money could be made from speculation. So what does the German government do? As you know, it passed an emergency law controlling speculation in foreign currency. Now, let's assume that the government agencies are so clever that they themselves can succeed in speculation. I don't believe they are, but let's assume so. In the next few weeks there would then be less private trading in foreign currencies in Germany. It is no exaggeration that boys thirteen and fourteen years old were trading in foreign money. What would happen if all this were stopped for a few weeks? A huge gap would arise between the price of necessities like groceries and the amount of money people could afford to spend on them. For example, in Germany today one cigarette costs seven marks. Well, people will pay that amount. Why? Because of the speculation in foreign money. You know that today old men can't afford seven marks for a cigarette, but young people who have made all kinds of money speculating can. Now, if this source of income is cut off, soon no one will be able to buy a good cigarette. This is just one aspect of the matter; another is that wages would have to be lowered in the cigarette industry. Then you would have the discrepancy of consumer goods being kept at their former prices and consumers unable to afford them. A new crisis would arise, and this is, in fact, the next to come.

Everything is done on the spur of the moment, which insures that one crisis follows another—and all this because people see only what is closest at hand. No results can be achieved in this manner. The only way to get out of the present chaotic situation is to have competent men in office again. To achieve anything, we must have men who know what they're doing, but present conditions indicate that nowhere are capable persons being consulted. So we must see to it that qualified people are again elected. Things won't progress by the clichés and vacuities people utter; all this is worthless. Just look at any newspaper. You may even happen to like one because it represents your party, but regardless of their political persuasions the facts they publish are worthless and lead to nothing. For this reason, it's almost a waste of time to occupy oneself with world politics; the field is barren. The only thing that needs to be considered is that once again education should produce competent people. Competence is what we should aim for because today nobody knows anything.

Those powers confronting the Europeans know the most. The Turks, for example, know exactly what they want, as do the Japanese. They want to further their own cultures, solely their own. Strangely enough, Europeans are indifferent about theirs. You can see now why one is reticent to talk about politics. It's like going to a party and discovering that everyone is indulging in platitudes; you will then not want to participate. That's pretty much the situation in politics these days.

Not long ago, Lloyd George delivered a speech. If you want to give a figurative description of it and you said it resembled a pile of chaff in which a few grains of wheat yet remained, then this comparison would not be quite rate. You should say, rather, that no wheat was left, that every last grain had been flailed out. Only then would we have a true picture of the speech Lloyd George gave a few days ago. Yet, I can say without a moment's hesitation that it was the most significant address delivered by a statesman in recent weeks. You see, even though his speech was vapid, he did have his fist in it. He did not actually do so, but one can imagine his having pounded the table every so often. That's one thing he can do. His words are empty, but there is something in his fist.

It's this way everywhere. I've stopped reading the speeches of Wirth, because the few lines that appear on the front page of the Basel newspaper tell me enough. It's then quite apparent that his whole speech amounts to nothing. The situation is absolutely pathetic, and it's pointless to become elated or depressed over any part of it. The thing is, anyone who is really sincere in his regard for humanity must say to himself that everything hinges on our finding competent men who can understand something of the world's problems and who can think, truly think.

For if one considers the remarks of Lloyd George—and perhaps he is actually the most capable of all these politicians—one discovers that he has never had an original thought. He can hold on to his position just because he has no thoughts. Thus, he can vacillate in one or the other direction and what he says is really trite. Were he ever to utter a thought, were the Union Party, the Conservative Party and the Labour Party to discover how they all stood with him, he would, of course, be thrown out of office. His whole skill consists in speaking in such a way that the others can't discern how they fare with him. If somebody's speech is continually inane, no one knows what to make of it. His great asset is his lack of thoughts, and he can use it because he himself does not know where he stands.

These are the conditions today, but this wasn't the case a few years ago. Two or three years ago one always had to say, “Something must be done before it's too late,” but today it is too late. Nothing can be suggested because now it is too late; it's simply too late. The most I can say is that things will improve only when qualified men again enter public life. Germany and Russia can sign as many treaties as they want but nothing will come of them. It isn't a question of signing treaties but of unfolding a healthy economic life.

The Stinnes conglomerate is a good example. Do you think for a moment that Mr. Stinnes could accomplish anything within the German labour force? Of course not; that's impossible. Stinnes is an industrialist who has advanced through skilful manipulation of foreign currency. But that is all he knows, how to advance himself, nothing else. Many people today have noticed that the government is getting nowhere, that all its treaties have had no effect on the economy. Since Stinnes acts independently of the government, the results are probably better, some say, but in any event his ideas are based solely on the manipulation of his interests in Germany and France. This is their only basis. Look at the Stinnes agreements and you'll see what heavy financing they would require. What Stinnes intends to do must be financed. Things are at such a pass, however, that to finance such ventures would just about deplete one's resources, would “raze all the woods in Austria.”

Naturally, a person can talk about all the things he would like to do when in reality none of them can succeed. As soon as he tries to carry one out, it won't work. People have seen that government treaties lead nowhere, no economic growth results from them. Stinnes's ventures are independent of government help so it is hoped that they will produce results. But it won't work. It doesn't matter that he naturally works arm in arm with other big capitalists. His plans cannot be realized because even he will not be able to finance them. Hence, Stinnes offers no solution.

Journalists are fascinated by the columns of figures he manipulates, and you see, gentlemen, when they write their editorials or feature sections, they are under no obligation; they can say whatever they please. You probably haven't saved them, but if you compare the articles written in 1912 with those written today in the same paper, you will discover a curious thing. After all, newspaper articles are ephemeral, no one gives them a second thought, and so journalists can make them as interesting as they like. Anyone who feels responsible for his statements, however, and does not fabricate articles at random knows that all of them are nothing but rubbish. This is the situation everywhere. Because people have no original ideas things have become desperate. Above all else we need original thoughts, new ideas; without these everything will go to ruin.

In Germany today, it takes 215 marks to buy a toothbrush. But what are 215 marks? Not even one franc! This sounds cheap to us here, but where does a German get 215 marks? Other consumer goods are proportionately more expensive. Today no one can afford an umbrella, but it can't be helped. When I was in Vienna I once went by taxi because I was in a hurry and it happened to be a holiday. The distance was one half mile, no more. The fare, gentlemen, was 3600 kronen! Today it would be ten times that. The same ride would cost 36,000 kronen. This is obviously absurd, but other things are equally so, even if people don't know it. For what is done to remedy this situation? If a short taxi ride costs 36,000 kronen, 500,000 kronen notes will be printed, and if it costs 360,000 kronen, one million notes will be issued. But such measures have no effect on economic life. Nothing is altered except that those who have a little money in their pockets today have nothing tomorrow, and those who speculate cleverly have double their former amount. But speculation with currency accomplishes nothing as far as

the mint par of exchange is concerned. It merely enables some people to make money without thought or effort, and when work comes to a halt in the world, hampered by usurious speculation, then things will have indeed reached a breaking point. So it accomplishes nothing at all. People simply have to realize that capable persons with insight into the affairs of the world must again take things in hand; there is no other way out.

To accomplish this, we must start with the right kind of education. Today people must begin to learn in school to comprehend the world. The other day I was reading a textbook that recommended a certain problem in arithmetic, and when I describe it you'll say, “So what?” But the arithmetic problem posed in this textbook is indicative of the most important thing in the world. It goes like this:

One person is 5 1/2 year old
Another is 18 7/12 years old
Another is 36 4/12 years old
Another is 35 5/12 years old

What is the total number of years of these four persons?

The children are asked to add all this together; this is what the textbook recommends. Of course, they will do so and arrive at the total of 173 6/12 years. Now I ask you, gentlemen, what bearing has this sum to reality? When would you ever need to figure out something like this? For the problem to have any meaning at all, it would have to be posed so that the first person happened to die just when the second was born, and the third died when the last was born. How many years elapsed from the birth of the first person to the death of the last? The former problem is unrealistic; no one will ever have to figure it out in actuality. Giving children problems like this amounts to giving them the most abstract arithmetic imaginable. Children are required to use their good sense to compute real nonsense.

Well, the person who devised this problem once learned that things could be added up. Now let's consider this case. Someone was born on a certain date, went to school until he was 14½ years old and then served as an apprentice for 5½ years. Following that, he worked under various masters for 3 years and then got married. Four years later he had a son, and when the son was 22, the father died. By adding up the years we arrive at the man's age, which is 49. This is something concrete, something real. Children are led out into real life when they are given problems like this and this applies to all situations. Otherwise, they sit for an hour over something that never occurs in actuality, but no one is shocked by this. If you point this out to people, they reply, “It doesn't matter how children learn arithmetic.” They don't think it's terribly important. But it happens to be of prime importance, for the people who read rubbish in textbooks as children will eventually spout it as adults; they'll talk nonsense, nothing but nonsense.

From all this you can understand the need for a renewal in education. The educational method I have spoken of bases everything on reality; from the very beginning it leads the human being into reality. This is what actually counts, and this is also why conditions will invariably worsen if people do things as they have in the past. You can start as many newspapers as you like, but if they are written in the same tired spirit, the same chaos will remain. This is why it is so important today for us to occupy ourselves with matters that will turn people into thinking human beings. For this to happen, however, we must see to it that teachers and textbooks do not present arithmetic problems like the one cited but only those that apply to life. Unfortunately, children are also learning languages, science and social studies in that unrealistic way. Everything is divorced from reality.

I've told you that in England it is customary to give those who receive a Master of Arts degree a medieval gown. This had meaning a few hundred years ago and was a reality. Today, it's different. Today someone can be a consultant to the government or something else and it means absolutely nothing. Things are just the same in those countries that underwent revolutions. You must realize that a complete change in education is called for; everything depends on that.

Does anybody else have a question that concerns you?

Question: It is claimed that the appendix may be removed without harm to the patient. We know that frequently this and other organs are taken out in operations. Earlier, we discussed the significance of the internal organs, and I would like to know what effect it has on a person if he is missing any.

Dr. Steiner. I shall answer this question after we have considered something else first, which I shall gladly do now.

Question: In recent lectures we have discussed the influence of the planets on man; I am interested in hearing more about this.

Dr. Steiner: What I have to say now will have a bearing on it. I shall answer these questions today and see how far we get. But first I would like to tell you a story to demonstrate the kind of knowledge we will be pursuing from now on.

In the early 'nineties of the last century, about thirty or thirty-one years ago, an official North American Trading and Transport Company held a convention. Invited to this meeting was a prominent financier named William Windom. By the standards of those gathered there he was a brilliant man, a person whom one immediately recognized as an authority. He was expected to give an address at this convention, and indeed he did so.

Windom began his speech by saying, “We need to reform our whole trade and transport system, for as they are today they contain something unhealthy.” He then went on to explain what money is; in his fairly short speech he touched on the significance of money. He said, “Well, gentlemen, I have now analysed national economic matters for you. But the point is that one realizes that the whole thing does not work. However much the currency circulates due to commerce and passes from hand to hand, that does not determine what in fact makes a national industry a sound one. What does make an industry sound are the moral concepts that people have. Unless moral concepts also flow through commerce, and money circulates in such a way that moral concepts are tied in with it, we get no further.” That is what he said.

Windom said that immoral conceptions in the commercial and industrial life is like having poison in the human blood stream. If immoral concepts accompany the circulation of money in transportation and industry, it is as if poison were to contaminate the blood in the arteries. Just as a man becomes ill on account of poison in his system, so does the economic body become unhealthy when poison—that is, immoral concepts—runs through its network.

Now it struck his listeners that Mr. Windom became a bit gray as he spoke of arteries in the context of economic life. They were surprised that someone who had previously spoken only of matters pertaining to economy and finance, who had in fact begun his speech on these subjects, should suddenly use this rather apt analogy and even elaborate on it. He described in detail how poison penetrates the blood and referred to moral concepts. This was indeed a change of subject, and when he uttered the words, “It is like this in economic life that immoral concepts go like poison through the arteries of industrial commerce,” he collapsed. He had a stroke and died on the spot.

Here you have an example of the phenomena I have often mentioned and from which we may learn a great deal. It is quite obvious what happened here. The man certainly did not die from the speech because he was not even excited at the time. He would have had a stroke even if he had been doing something completely different; the conditions for it were simply present in his system. By no means was the stroke brought on by the speech, although it conceivably hastened it by an hour. In any event, his system had been predisposed to a stroke for a long time, and he would have had it anywhere else as well.

The other point to be observed here is that he suddenly left his topic and began to describe his own inner condition. This he did quite logically and within the boundaries of his talk. Imagine, the man stands before his audience and speaks to them about something thoroughly economic; suddenly the course of this thought changes as he turns rather gray. He keeps to the theme of his address, but what he describes now is his own condition before death. This is what he turned to; his speech took this direction on account of his own inner condition. Much can be learned from this, which also happens in other, less drastic forms.

Let us suppose a speaker loses his train of thought. This is something I have witnessed more than once. Usually, whereas at first the speaker confidently faced his audience, having lost his train of thought, he would now make a slight movement and glimpse downward. He had placed his top hat in front of him, and his speech was under it! After he found his thread of thought he could resume talking. Something like that can happen. I once saw a mayor who got stuck after the first ten words pick up his hat and bravely proceed to read the speech right off. The mayor could read, but if he had continued to talk without his notes, if he had spoken impromptu, well, nothing but twaddle would have come out. He could read; otherwise, his speech would have amounted to nothing.

How would William Windom have fared? The conditions for the imminent stroke were in his system, and if we consider man's whole constitution, it makes little difference whether we are in the situation of William Windom or of the mayor. The mayor could read, as we saw, and so could the man who suffered the stroke. But where did William Windom read? He read what was happening in his own body; he simply read that off. From this you may see that what spiritual science has discovered is correct. Whenever we talk we are actually always reading something that is going on within us. Naturally, what we say is based upon our external experiences, but that mingles with what goes on in our bodies. Our utterances are actually read off from our inner processes, which, of course, do not always have such sad consequences for us as a stroke. Every time you say something, even if it's only five words, you read it from within your body. If you jot something down, five days later you can read it in your notebook; and if you commit it to memory, then it becomes part of the script within you and you can read it from within. It is the same process as reading from a book. The act of reading is the same whether done from without or within; only the direction in which we look is different. It doesn't matter if you have noted “five nails, seven hooks” on paper or in your brain. If you have noted it in a book you can read it off from the page where it was recorded; if you have made a mental note of it, a brain cell imprinted with “five” has linked itself with others carrying the messages “seven,” “nails” and “hooks.” A whole loop has come into being in your brain, and, without being aware of it, you look at these loops within yourself and read off the mental notations. This is what we are led to realize from examining such a drastic case as William Windom's.

I have mentioned another example that we may briefly recall now. This incident concerns Karl Ludwig Schleich, a well-known doctor, and was reported by him. A man came rushing to him and said, “I've just pricked myself with this pen; look, there is still ink on me. You must amputate my right arm or I'll die of blood poisoning!”

Schleich, whom I knew well—he died just recently—told me this himself. He said to the man, “What's the matter with you? As a surgeon I cannot take the responsibility of amputating your arm! The ink just needs to be sucked out. It's really nothing, and it would be nonsensical to cut off your arm!”

The person replied, “All right, but then I will die! You absolutely must take off my arm.”

Dr. Schleich said to him, “I won't do it; I can't cut off an arm for no reason whatsoever.”

“Well,” said the patient, “then I will die.”

When Schleich let him go, the man rushed to a second doctor to ask him to amputate. Naturally, he also refused the request, and the fellow kept running around the whole evening saying, as he had to Dr. Schleich, that he would die in the night.

Schleich was quite concerned about the man. Of course, there were no grounds for amputating his arm, but the first thing the following morning Schleich inquired about him. He had easily sucked the ink out of the man's small wound, since pricking yourself with a pen is a minor matter. But when Schleich arrived at the man's house the next morning he found him dead; he had indeed died! Now, what did Schleich say? He said that the man had died of auto-suggestion, that he had talked himself into dying and that his own thoughts had killed him. It's true that in a case like this, one speaks of auto-suggestion, but I told Schleich that even though all kinds of things happen through auto-suggestion, it cannot account for a death like this. To say so is nonsense. Schleich did not believe me.

What really happened? Only one who sees completely through the human being can discover what really occurred in this case. The doctors performed an autopsy and found no trace of blood poisoning. There was no sign of anything amiss, and so they were satisfied with the conclusion that death had been caused by auto-suggestion. But here, too, the real cause was a stroke that would have been difficult to diagnose and, as you can imagine, had been building up for several days. The conditions for the stroke had been mounting in the delicate organs for days. The man dimly saw this happening within himself, just as Windom sensed that poison was penetrating his arteries moments before he was stricken. He felt that his body was about to succumb on account of the negative substances introduced into his system by some food. One can carry on for a long time without any apparent change on the surface while within, the conditions of death are maturing. The man in question somehow sensed this, became nervous and pricked his hand. He would not have done so otherwise. Up until this moment he was not aware of what was occurring within him and what was going to happen, but when he pricked himself, he said what he could not have said before, “I shall die from the pen prick!” Nobody says, “I feel death approaching me” if he feels perfectly healthy otherwise, but now he could ascribe his imminent death to the pen prick, even though it was the wrong cause. There was no auto-suggestion here; the man would have died the following night in any event. But he became nervous, and when he pricked his hand with a pen, the thought of imminent death arose in him in a completely erroneous form. He consulted doctors, but even Ludwig Schleich, who was a brilliant man, did not believe him. He thought that this was just a case of auto-suggestion and was convinced that the man had talked himself into dying. But this is nonsense. In fact, the cause of death already existed and the pen prick was but the result of apprehension.

From this you may see that much is happening within ourselves, and if these matters are not properly studied we simply cannot cope with them. Our starting point must be the origin of man. We must know in what form he existed when the ichthyosauria, the plesiosauria and the megatheria swam about in a thick fluid on what was then the earth. We cannot discover the interconnections of things without reference to and study of the human being.

There are many other aspects to be considered as well. At what age do people die most frequently? We know that infants die most often within the first few months after birth. Afterward, the mortality rate slowly decreases. Children have their childhood diseases up to the time of their change of teeth, and if they took better care of themselves by sitting up properly and the like, they would have fewer illnesses during their school years. Even so, the fewest illnesses occur between the ages of seven and fourteen. Then it starts up again. There is a great difference, however, between the diseases of infancy and those of puberty.

If we look at the illnesses that children die from during the earliest periods of life, we always find a quite definite form of blood suppuration. The blood becomes purulent. The child has a delicate constitution at that age and can succumb without it being established what develops from this suppuration. In fact, the child would develop jaundice. When an adult has suppuration of the blood, the condition progresses to the stage of jaundice, which generally can be cured quickly. The infant, however, dies before reaching this stage.

Many children get diarrhoea, which cannot be cured by the means one uses with adults. External remedies such as enemas or compresses must be used, but it's worthless to give a child medication. Children also get thrush, blisters that spring up mainly on the tongue, and all the other childhood diseases that sprout up from within—scarlet fever, measles and the like—as though the whole internal constitution were blooming. Adults can also get these illnesses, of course, but they belong essentially to childhood. They predominate during the early ages and then decline after the child gets his second teeth. These illnesses, which call for a careful diet and preferably external treatment, do not occur in this form after the second teeth. It is difficult to discover what causes purulent blood in a child. It arises from deep within the system. Convulsions, so-called childhood spasms, also frequently afflict children.

The illnesses that human beings contract during puberty are completely different. You need only consider the complaints of young girls. They develop anaemia, a problem caused by the body not properly nourishing the blood. When a child has blood suppuration, something else within the constitution contaminates the blood stream; when a girl has anaemia, the blood itself becomes ill. It is one problem if something within the system is infecting the blood and quite another if the blood becomes diseased. It is quite a different problem if the blood becomes sluggish, as it may, for example, in a boy or girl, a condition that then leads to haemorrhoids.

Thus, it is that in two periods of his life man is particularly prone to illness: up to the age of seven and between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one. In the intervening period he is predisposed to health. It is important to understand that the human being is not at all times equally prone to illness, that the times vary and that the illnesses have a completely different character at these various times. A study of this can lead us ever deeper into the human organization, and in this way we can begin to understand the functions of the inner organs.

You see, on the one hand you have the case of Mr. William Windom, who suddenly starts to speak of his organs as death approaches; on the other, you have the appearance of diseases in early childhood and the 'teens, which tell us that different processes occur during the successive stages of life. We must learn to decipher what occurs in man; we must learn to read these processes. When a child gets thrush or red patches on the body, for example, we must understand what is happening internally. Only when we have learned to read his inner processes can we arrive at a real knowledge of man.

If you merely put a dead human being on the dissecting table and only examine an individual organ, the removal of which causes no special effect, you won't discover anything pertinent. A diseased spleen, for example, can be surgically removed, and the operation can benefit the patient. He will be in better health for a period of time than if the spleen had remained in his body in its diseased condition. If you simply look at a spleen that has been surgically removed, you won't see what distinguishes it from, say, the stomach. Yet, if the whole stomach is removed, the patient has a difficult time. This is risky and in the long run someone with an artificial stomach cannot expect to have good health. There are organs that simply cannot be taken out: both lungs, for instance, and least of all, the brain. If a certain spot in the brain is hit with a mere needle, the person will die immediately. The elephant also has this spot in his brain. If you make a puncture there and hit it precisely—it need not even be cut out—this huge beast will be instantly killed. You may remove its spleen, however, and the animal will live on for many years. Thus, you see, it makes a difference which organ is removed from the body—a spleen, an appendix or something else.

To grasp this fact, we must thoroughly study the human being. Remember what I have said about these little brain creatures, these cells representing recollection that I have sketched here. They are still soft and alive in the small child and only gradually harden. Only when a child reaches his seventh year and has gone through the change of teeth have they hardened sufficiently. Then, at the onset of puberty, other cells called leucocytes start to move about more freely in the blood. They go through the whole blood stream and become more active at puberty. Before that time, they move about sluggishly. There are two periods in our lives when conditions arise that make us prone to illness. The first occurs from infancy to age seven, when the organism—or actually, the soul within the physical organism—must exert itself to mould and harden the brain cells. The second falls at puberty, when the soul must take pains to give mobility to the leucocytes, those little creatures contained in the blood.

To use an analogy, if you are building a house you must use mortar that will properly harden; otherwise, you will not succeed. So it is with the brain cells; they must harden sufficiently. When they do not, children become victims of this or that disease. We shall go further into the causes of these various illnesses next time. After puberty one is dealing with millions upon millions of white blood corpuscles. Until then, they are sluggish, and if they were a herd, it would take a great many shepherds to get them going. If this goading impulse is absent, anaemia results. So we see it depends on these aspects that in the early years of childhood and again at puberty certain illnesses may appear.

If the human being is studied like this, we can gradually comprehend all the interconnections. Indeed, we cannot accomplish anything in social life either unless we know these facts of natural science.

Gentlemen, at our last session I started to answer your question about the inner organs of man. Of course, this subject must be seen from a broad perspective and treated from its foundations. We saw how William Windom, who died while delivering a speech, expressed his own inner condition by reading it off, as it were, from his body. After citing another case, we found in examining certain facts about the course of human life that the mortality rate is highest in man's infancy, that human beings die most frequently in their early years. In the period from birth up to the change of teeth at age seven, the mortality rate is at its peak, though it diminishes with the third, fourth and fifth years.

The human being is healthiest from the time of his change of teeth to puberty. This is indeed so, and if we ourselves are careful to prevent the causes of ill health, such as bad posture, which can lead to curvatures, and foul air, which can afflict the internal organs, we can count on children to be healthiest during their school years. The illnesses that do befall them then are for the most part due to external causes. Not until the teens does the danger again arise when man can fall ill from processes arising within his own constitution.

These illnesses, however, are quite different from those of early childhood.

I have mentioned that infants are highly susceptible to suppuration of the blood. It can become so purulent that symptoms of jaundice appear. In children, irregular digestion frequently results in diarrhoea. They also get thrush—those little white pustules in various places—and another, completely different kind of illness, so-called infantile convulsions. A childhood disease that is particularly prevalent these days is infantile paralysis, which can also affect adults. It is extremely damaging; the children cannot move their legs and become quite paralyzed. This disease is increasing rapidly. Perhaps you have read that schools have had to be closed in the province of Thüringen because of an epidemic there.

Thus, we can see that childhood illnesses have a distinctive character; they are quite different from the diseases man gets in later life. Scarlet fever and measles are specifically childhood illnesses, though adults, too, can contract the latter. But we must now ask ourselves why children are particularly susceptible to all these illnesses.

We can explain this susceptibility only if we know how forces work in the human body. When we examine the human embryo in the first, second or third months of pregnancy, we see that it is utterly different form what the human being later becomes. In the first and second months the child is all head; the other organs are only appendages to the head. What later turn into limbs, hands and feet are little stumps, and the actual lung and abdominal region are not yet functioning.

You see, if you take the human embryo (a sketch is drawn here) it looks like this. It is enclosed in a kind of sack, to which are attached blood vessels from the body of the mother. These blood vessels penetrate throughout the embryo, which the mother supplies with blood and nourishment. The other matter is supplementary and is later discarded. In comparison to the rest of the body the embryo's head is huge. See (pointing to the drawing), this is the head; the rest consists of appendages not yet functioning. This part will later become the heart and digestive system. The blood circulation is provided from outside, from the mother. These little stumps will develop into hands and feet. So we can say that the embryo is all head. Its other organs are insignificant because the mother's system provides all the nourishment and air. Hence, during the first few months, the embryo consists primarily of a head.

People are surprised that mental illnesses are hereditary. In fact, mental illnesses are always based on physical ailments; they arise from a malfunctioning of the body. Neither the spirit nor the soul can fall ill. Though mental illnesses are always rooted in physical problems, people wonder how they can occur through heredity, which indeed they can do. If a parent, particularly the mother, suffers from tuberculosis or another disease like arteriosclerosis, which admittedly occurs rarely in younger persons, the children do not necessarily become afflicted with these illnesses but instead can suffer from mental deficiencies. People are surprised about this, but need it puzzle us, gentlemen? Whatever the child can inherit must be inherited first of all from its head. Therefore, if the mother is consumptive, one need not be surprised that her condition is not passed on to the lungs of the unborn child, which, after all, are not even functioning yet. The condition is rather carried over into the head and comes to expression in the brain. Thus, nobody should be surprised that the disease inherited is quite different from that of the parent. Venereal disease, for example, can appear in children as an eye disease. It is no wonder, for when the child's head is developing, its eyes are exposed to what afflicts the parents; its eyes are in an environment that's venereally diseased! So it is not at all surprising.

When the child is born, everyone knows that the most completely formed part of it is its head. In the succeeding years it is the rest of the body that grows the most; the head has much less growing to do than the other organs. This fact tells us how, in reality, the inner organs of man function. Materialistic science cannot form an accurate conception of this because it fails to realize that all growth proceeds from the head. In the child everything is regulated from the head. We can see this most clearly in the embryo, which is nothing more than a head. But even after birth all inner processes are regulated from this part of the body. The digestion, the blood circulation and all other activities in human organization are directed by the head.

Suppose that a child is born whose blood circulation is too slow. For some reason, through some hereditary factor, it can happen that the child's blood circulation is too slow. Let us imagine this case. (See drawing.) Here is the child's heart, and here, its arteries; through both the blood is travelling too slowly. The heart is being formed from the head, but even when the head functions perfectly, the circulation can still be too slow. Thus, even though the heart is properly developed, the blood doesn't flow into it correctly. This is often the case in earliest infancy. The head is perfectly developed, but the blood flows too slowly into the heart. Poor circulation may result simply from keeping the child in stifling air. It cannot breathe properly, and its circulation slows down. The blood circulation may slacken also if the baby is not properly nourished. Then its blood cannot thoroughly penetrate the body. The head may be in excellent shape and try to form the heart aright, but the blood circulation remains sluggish. What happens in such instances is that, because the blood is not circulating well enough, certain substances that normally would be pushed down from the heart into the kidneys and expelled remain in the body; they stay in the blood. When these substances that should have been discharged stay in the system, the blood suppurates.

In the seventh, eighth or ninth years, this danger is not so acute as it is in the earliest years of childhood. You see, the fact that a child has its second set of teeth shows that its body is sufficiently strong; if it were not, the teeth would not come in properly. Why? Well, you must understand that what is contained in a tooth comes out of the whole body. The second teeth emerge from within the whole system; they are the product not just of something in the jaw but of the whole body. This is true only of the second teeth, however, for the first teeth, the so-called milk teeth, are completely different. They are the result of heredity, of the fact that the child's mother and father have teeth. Only after the milk teeth are expelled in the course of the first seven years does the child get its own teeth. The body must make the second teeth for itself.

Actually, a child nine or ten years old already has its second body. It has already completely discarded the one it had inherited, and comes into possession of its own body only around the age of seven. During these first seven years it demonstrates that it was born with enough resistance to tolerate air and nourishment. After it has built up its body and produced its second teeth, the danger of falling ill is no longer so acute. The danger is most acute in earliest infancy while it is learning to cope for itself in breathing, eating, that is, everything that once was done for it within the protection of the mother's womb. In these early years the head is actually in good shape; only with age does it become less perfect. In old age the head doesn't work as well as it did in infancy. It must think and occupy itself with the surroundings and so something often goes amiss. But the infant does not yet need to learn anything, go to school or possess skills. The head works only on the child's own body, and in most cases it does this quite well. During these tender years, however, when the human being is just becoming used to the world, the rest of the body is quite vulnerable. Modern science also has described these matters but not quite as I have, for what I tell you is exact. Popular science does not really comprehend the whole process and cannot explain why the human being is most vulnerable in its earliest years. It cannot come to terms with this fact because it explains away the soul and spirit.

In reality, soul-spiritual elements are united with the child, mainly with the head, while it is still in the mother's womb and after birth. The forces that work on the child from within the head are invisible soul-spiritual forces. Should any of you think that this is merely an arbitrary opinion, you would be committing the same error as one of the following men. Suppose one man says, “Here is a piece of iron,” and the other says, “Fine! I'll shoe my horse with it.” The first man then says, “No, it would be stupid to shoe your horse with this. It's a magnet, and it has a hidden force. Magnets are used for quite other things than for shoeing horses!” The one man thinks the piece of iron should be used for a horseshoe, while the other knows that it is a magnet containing an invisible force. Well, the person who says, in accordance with materialistic science, “The head is nothing but a bit of bones and brains,” is just like the fellow who says of the magnet, “This is a horseshoe.” Indeed, it is not a horseshoe, nor is the head of the infant just flesh and bone. Within it invisible forces are working like a sculptor to build up the whole organism. The human form is among those things the child keeps as an inheritance, but the forces that, during the first seven years, tirelessly build up this form from the head are brought into the world not from the parents but from quite another source.

Suppose a man received these forces from his parents. Well, gentlemen, if a parent is a genius, does that make the child a genius as well? Or if a child is a genius, does that mean the parents were also highly gifted? Not at all! Goethe, for example, was certainly a genius, but his father was a dreadful philistine, and his mother was a kind and pleasant woman who could tell a good story but surely was no genius. Goethe's son was rather stupid; he was no genius either. Whatever pertains to the soul and spirit is not hereditary; it is brought into this world from quite other realms and then is united with the part that is inherited. Aside from the time he spends in his mother's womb, man lives before birth as a being of soul and spirit.

The only reason people disavow this today is that all through the Middle Ages the Catholic Church forbade anyone to ascribe to man a life of soul and spirit before birth. It assumed that the soul was created at birth by a God whose nature was also assumed. So throughout the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church forbade the concept of pre-existence, as it was called, meaning “existence before, prior to birth.” Modern materialistic science has merely followed suit and then congratulated itself on its cleverness. Now people think they are extraordinarily clever to hold this opinion; unfortunately, they fail to realize how they were conditioned to do so.

In truth, man not only inherits a physical existence from his parents and forebears but also brings into the world a soul-spiritual element that works within him. If one does not acknowledge that the soul-spiritual aspect is present before birth, one cannot see that the same soul and spirit remain after death; at most, one can believe it. Knowledge of the immortality of the soul is dependent on knowledge of its existence before birth. If one maintains that the soul came into being with the creation of the body, then, of course, a divine creator would have the privilege of letting the soul disappear upon the body's dissolution. If, however, it is the soul that builds up the body in the first place, then it certainly remains unaffected when the body dies.

Thus, the existence of the human soul follows readily from all the aspects that one can correctly observe. Indeed, how could the soul die, since it is the soul itself that builds up the physical body! One would have to investigate far different regions to discover whether or not the soul can perish. In future lectures we shall consider this question and find that it cannot die in these realms either. It obviously cannot die with the body because it is the soul that built it up.

We have now become acquainted with illnesses that originate because the soul-spiritual element works out of the head, and the body is malfunctioning. But the blood circulation can also be too slow. Stagnation sets in and the blood then suppurates. Still, something entirely different can happen, too. The infant may be too weak to absorb nourishment through its intestines into its blood. Because the body is too weak, nourishment does not pass through the villi and the child becomes afflicted with diarrhoea. What should have been absorbed to remain longer in the body is expelled. Because the food was not properly digested, diarrhoea results, and the substance is discharged unchanged. This is connected with something else. Obviously, a child can get diarrhoea in different degrees, and it may even get summer cholera. Whatever the degree, however, it is only the first stage. If the child cannot digest its food for a considerable length of time, its inner organs cannot be built up properly. The head constantly wants to work on them, but the inner organs cannot be correctly constructed because the necessary substances are lacking. Say you were working on a statue and ran out of clay but continued to make empty-handed motions in the air. In a like manner the head starts to move and fidget around when the child lacks the substance from which its organs can be built. It wants to form the heart or stomach but can only aimlessly fidget about because the substances the head should have received have been eliminated causing diarrhoea.

The educated but materialistic scientist faces a complete puzzle here. He examines the child, discovers diarrhoea and prescribes some medication to stop it. As a result, food will merely accumulate in the intestines because they cannot be absorbed, and the child will get nothing more than a swollen stomach. If one were to examine the organism further, one would discover that the heart is malformed, that it is an empty pouch, or that the lungs are empty sacks. They want to be formed but lack the necessary substances. The forces originating from the head that penetrate into the lungs, which may now be empty sacks, need something to grasp and work with. I can grasp this chair and shake it or, without having taken hold of it, I can merely fidget about like an idiot. But what happens when the head forces fidget about in the lungs? Convulsions occur. A rational explanation of convulsions must acknowledge that the head is fidgeting around and finds no support. Diarrhoea may be explained materialistically but convulsions can no longer be accounted for along these lines.

All this demonstrates that in the infant the soul-spiritual processes are at their height of activity. Later, this activity subsides. Up to the child's sixth or seventh years, however, these spiritual forces are so active that they can separate minute amounts of matter from food that will constitute the second teeth. Imagine having to do that yourself! You would have to be clever enough to distinguish the magnesium salts and carbonates contained in the food. Even if you could do that you would first have to analyse the teeth chemically and learn from them themselves. The teeth made artificially today are not living teeth; no one really knows how teeth are produced. Yet minute portions of the nourishment the child receives up to its seventh year are withdrawn to make the second teeth. Furthermore, to correctly separate the various substances you would need to know not only the chemical composition of food and teeth but also the activity in the stomach. What happens to the minute particles secreted in the second or third years? How do you retain them long enough in the blood stream so that, at just the right time, during the sixth and seventh years, they will penetrate the jaws to build up the teeth? All this that must be accomplished is done unconsciously by the child's soul and spirit. No one here would feel insulted if I said that you cannot produce or make one hair grow on your head. But a child can. It drives the proper substances to the spot where the hair takes root and then offers them to the light, for hair grows under the influence of light. All this occurs in the child, but modern science is unwilling to consider these aspects. It leaves people in the dark by refusing to acknowledge that soul-spiritual forces work within the organism that originate, not from the parents, but from the spiritual world.

Let us return to this matter of hair. Man normally grows hair only on certain parts of his body, but once, ages ago, he was covered completely with a shaggy growth of hair. Why did he lose it? I will not give you a theory, which anyone can dream up, but merely point out some facts. Consider another creature, the pig. When pigs are free in nature, they are covered with hair, but domesticated pigs lose it. In their natural habitat wild boars grow thick coats of fur; when they are domesticated and in surroundings not originally their own, they lose it. Man, like the domesticated animals, did not originally live under today's conditions. But there was a time when, under the influence of light and warmth, he grew hair all over his body, and we may witness this fact today in an embryo a few months old. During the first months of pregnancy the whole embryo, insofar as it is only a head, is covered with hair. Later, the hair disappears. I have already explained how plants in their first stage of growth utilize light and warmth from the previous year. Likewise, the child has hair on account of the light and warmth emanating from the mother. Only later is it lost. So a consideration of hair, too, can show us how forces of soul and spirit work on the body.

I have said that the human being is most healthy during the school years, between the ages of seven and fourteen. Why is this so? Only those children who can develop those strong forces that produce the second teeth survive. During that period, the child unfolds vigorous forces, but they must first be acquired in the earliest years through radical adaptation. Everything that the head accomplishes within the organism is most pronounced during those early years. Though the child is unaware of its activity, the head must really exert itself and be a great artisan. It has to overcome the body's constant resistance all by itself because it gets no support in its continual and taxing efforts during the first seven years. This tremendous strain causes all those illnesses I have told you about.

Let us now suppose that the circulation of the blood is malfunctioning, not on account of its absorbing too little nourishment, but because it absorbs too much. This can also happen. Indeed, the parents, who often think it is best to stuff the baby with food, may not be as wise as the organism. They can hardly be reproached for this practice, though, because it is usually quite difficult to tell when the child has had enough. Children know their limits, as a rule, through their own inherent wisdom and instinct. If the mother produces too much milk, however, and it is fed to the child, its instinct will become uncertain through eating too much. Now, if too much food is absorbed by the system, the head cannot keep up; it cannot handle too large an amount and will try to eliminate the surplus. The food has already been absorbed into the blood through the intestines, however, so the head cannot eliminate the surplus in the normal way. What does it do then? It discharges the superfluous substances through the skin. Measles and scarlet fever are the result.

These illnesses differ completely from diarrhoea and convulsions. A child gets the latter because it does not receive enough food and its forces fidget around aimlessly within the body. When too much food is absorbed, however, it must somehow be eliminated, occasionally even through the lungs. Diphtheria and pneumonia are the body's defence measures used to rid itself of substances it cannot otherwise eliminate through the skin. When one understands the human being and the processes that occur in the body, one finds it quite natural that an infant is susceptible to these illnesses.

A child can be afflicted with yet other diseases. Take the case of a child who is too weak to produce his second teeth. His milk teeth were inherited and required no effort from his system. Now, it can happen that the forces unable to produce the new teeth are diverted into the lungs. The lungs become inflamed and the child gets pneumonia. You see, the human body is extremely complicated, and when a child falls ill with pneumonia the doctor should examine the condition not only of the lungs but also of the kidneys, stomach, etc. When an illness arises, one must always examine the whole body and not just the part immediately affected.

When a child has reached the age of seven, however, its breathing processes have become sufficiently developed to function without the intervention of the head. In the infant the head must constantly regulate the breathing. It must not only build up the teeth but also care for the organs of breathing. When the head has been relieved of these tasks at age seven or eight, the child is now in a position to breathe properly. It is of utmost importance to realize that with the second teeth the child can bring order into its breathing, and can receive its second lungs and bronchi, as it were, which have by now been built up. The child no longer breathes with a weak inherited organism but with the new one that has been built up. Now it is in quite a different situation; now it has support. It is one thing if the child has inherited from, say, a weak mother and father, a breathing apparatus that must be directed from a head that is too weak, and it is quite another thing if it has properly built up a second apparatus suited to its needs. A head that is too weak simply cannot build up the lungs properly. Thus, because from age seven to fourteen the organs of breathing are in such fine shape, the individual is then at his healthiest. The positive aspect of these years is that the breathing process is at its best. With the onset of puberty, however, some of the nourishment is now diverted to this development. In the younger child substances are not yet absorbed through the later processes of puberty, but now digestion must take a completely new form. The reason is easily understood, for something completely new has come into play and its food is diverted in a new direction. From the age of puberty onward the mature organs of breathing cause the digestive organs to readjust so that the right counter-pressure is exerted from the stomach and intestines, since some of what earlier constituted the overall pressure was diverted. Now, the proper counter-pressure must come about. No wonder that anaemia and other illnesses afflict girls of this age since the organism must take time to adjust.

From age seven to fourteen the child enjoys its greatest protection from illness. In earlier years the head must make a tremendous effort to work into the rest of the organism and it must adjust to this task. Then, during the school years, the child is at its healthiest. The second breathing system is unhindered and can freely distribute the oxygen to the benefit of both the brain and the digestion. As I have mentioned before, things can be upset only through outside causes—activities in school and the like.

But now the child reaches puberty. Look at a boy. Up to this point he has perfected his body and is as healthy as a human being can be. He has successfully renewed his organism and everything has gone smoothly. But with the onset of puberty his metabolism begins to affect his whole body. The processes of digestion begin to work upward into his breathing system and, as a result, his voice changes. At the age when he must again reform his organism, the metabolic system becomes influential. This is expressed in a deepening of the voice. He must make new exertions and again illnesses threaten.

You see, only when we observe the human being in this manner are we able to answer the question one of you gentlemen posed last time. Otherwise, we cannot even think about it, let alone learn anything. But knowing now that it is the head that works the most during the first seven years, what conclusion may we reach? You must understand that, while the head is developed in the mother's organism, it is not merely formed by conception and substance but by the whole universe. The mother's substances represent only the foundation on which the form occurs. The head is a representation, an image of the universe. Its roundness indicates the working of the whole universe, and it is no idle fancy that the starry heavens work upon the skull, which is sometimes covered by a stupid looking hat. It is as true as this fact that I've mentioned to you before. Suppose we have a compass; the magnetic needle always points north, not just anywhere. Now, no one thinks that the needle contains the forces that determine its position. Everyone agrees that it is the magnetic forces of the earth, and that the needle takes its direction from these earthly forces. Everyone comprehends that. Yet, in regard to human embryonic development, men falsely think it all arises from conception. It would be just as clever to think that the direction pointed to by the magnetic needle was determined by its own forces.

The human head represents the whole cosmos, and this it is that has worked upon it. In addition, these forces bestowed by the universe continue to work within the child through its head. To build up the lungs, for example, the head must receive the right forces from the universe. To perfect the kidneys, forces must be received from far-off regions, from Jupiter, for instance. This is no idle fancy. It can be investigated just as other, physical matters can be investigated. Thus, when a child is born, it carries within its head all the forces of the universe.

Of course, it is nonsense to say that the moon, sun or Jupiter have an influence on an organ, or to cast a horoscope thinking the planet Jupiter, for example, is dominant. The head is formed from the whole universe, and the forces that work on the human being during the first seven years have been given to the head from the cosmos. During the next seven years, man becomes increasingly accustomed to the earth's atmosphere, so that whereas before he was influenced by the stars, he is now influenced by the air.

After this period the substances of digestion and the metabolic system play such an important part that they can even affect the voice. What does this mean? It is all a result of what we absorb through digestion from the earth. I have already explained to you this process of how, for example, substances from the earth must first be made lifeless within the intestines. This becomes man's main task when he reaches puberty. At that time he becomes dependent on the earth. As males we owe our voices first of all to the air, but the deepening results from the action of earthly substances. We can be born on earth because originally we were beings of the stars. After birth we let the forces we have brought with us from the starry worlds echo within our organisms. Then we become beings of the air. Only at puberty are we assigned to the earth to become its beings. Only then do we become attached to those things that fetter us to this planet. Thus, you see the course of man's descent to the earth from the cosmos.

Often materialists blindly fantasize about human development. They do not realize that man gradually accustoms himself to the earth and then, in old age, grows away from it. For what happens in old age? The forces we possess in advanced age we also possessed in youth. They hardened the bones while the other parts stayed pliable. But in old age the forces contained in the bones pass into the rest of the body, and the initial result is arteriosclerosis. The arteries harden, and the brain can calcify. Actually, the brain must always contain a minute amount of what arises through calcification. The child would be dull if its brain lacked these minute traces of calcium secreted by the pineal gland. The soul could not act; it would not have the substances in which to work. But if later in old age too much calcium is secreted and calcification occurs, the soul again cannot direct matters because it encounters too much resistance. This can result in paralysis or apoplexy or some other kinds of stroke. One can also become senile, since one can no longer take hold of and use the brain. Calcification in other parts of the body has the same effect, lifting one out of the region of the earthly forces. Thus we can see how man, up to the end of puberty, grows into the forces of the earth and how, later, when the secreted deposits become increasingly resistant and the soul's activity is impeded, he grows away from the earth.

So you see that it is, in fact, possible to discover what man has received and brought down from the universe. But one must not fall for superstitions such as a certain star is influencing the lung of a thirty-five year old man even though the lung has indeed been built up by the forces that initially descended from the stars into the head of the infant.

By examining such things scientifically, one arrives at a real science of the spirit. A spiritual science exists, and it can be studied just like any other science. We can belittle ancient times as much as we like, but in those days people did know something. Granted, we cannot bring back the past; what was right for people then is not so for us today. But if once again we have men who understand the world and man, men who know that the human head is not just produced in the mother's womb as a kind of pinhead, then we shall also have better politicians. You see, gentlemen, a person who knows nothing of these matters and of the nature of the human being cannot be a good politician simply because he will not know what people need. It is absolutely essential that once more there be men who really know something about the world. This is what we must strive for.

Schools must again teach people something of value. Today, much importance is placed on learning the skills required for making machines. Nothing can be said against this from the standpoint of spiritual science because it is quite worthwhile. But the skills needed to cope among human beings are neglected. An abstract social science, ignorant of man's needs, was invented and this is taught instead. Above all, one must study man as we have done here, but unhappily what I told you is not taught. Look back on your own school days! Where is something like this taught today? That is what our age lacks. Teaching men the things they learn today is about as good for them as feeding them rocks instead of bread. Maybe the stomach of a goose can take rocks but that of a human being cannot! To do so would ruin the digestive system, and when you teach men what is being taught today, you actually ruin their heads. You know that the arm becomes weak if it is unused, and the head also becomes weak if it is not used in the right way. While the head was developing in the mother, it received forces from the stars. If it is told nothing about them, if it entertains no thoughts of them, it grows weak, just as muscles do when they are not exercised. If the child learns nothing of the real world, it remains weak. The worst thing about conditions today is that people have weak heads and do not understand anything about one another. They separate themselves according to social standing and do not speak to those of other classes. This is like training a man to become an athlete while neglecting his biceps. If, in educating men, I leave their heads weak, they will not know the very thing that matters most. This is how things stand.

When children have finished building up their organisms with inherent, unconscious wisdom and have received their second teeth, it is of utmost importance to impart to them something that they have previously employed unconsciously. Then do they become proper human beings, people who can direct their thoughts properly and conceive of spiritual science in the right way. Once social thinking is ruined, nothing rational can be achieved. But if we make use of a genuine science of the spirit, much can be improved in that respect.

A question was asked about the design that appeared on the cover of the Austrian journal, Anthroposophy, showing the heads of an eagle, a lion, a bull and a man.

Dr. Steiner. Gentlemen, I think we should first bring to a conclusion our explanation of the human being, and then next time consider the aspects of man that these four symbols—the eagle, lion, bull and man—represent. Before we can say anything about them we must build a foundation, and this is something I shall try to do before the end of today's lecture. These four creatures, including man, spring from an ancient knowledge of the human being. They cannot be explained as the ancient Egyptians, for instance, would have done, but today they must be explained differently. One can interpret them correctly, of course, but nowadays one must begin from slightly different suppositions.

I would like now to direct your attention again to the way the human being evolves from his embryonic stage. I would like you to look once more at the very first stage, the earliest period. Conception has occurred, and the embryo is developing in the mother's womb. At first, it is just one microscopic cell containing proteinaceous substance and a nucleus. This single cell, the fertilized egg, actually marks the beginning of man's physical life.

Let us look then at the processes that immediately follow. What does this tiny egg, placed within the body of the mother, do? It divides. The one cell becomes two, and each of these cells divides in turn, thus creating more and more cells like the first. Eventually, our whole body is made up of such cells. They do not remain completely round but assume all manner of shapes and forms.

We must now take into account something I have mentioned before, which is the fact that the whole universe acts upon this minute cell in the mother's body. Nowadays, of course, such matters generally cannot be met with the necessary understanding, but it is nonetheless true that the whole cosmos works upon this cell. It is not at all the same if the ovum divides when, say, the moon stands in front of, or at a distance from, the sun. The whole starry heavens shed an influence on this cell, whose interior forms itself accordingly.

I have said before that during the first few months only the head of the unborn child is developed. (Referring to a drawing.) The head is already formed to this extent, and the rest of the body is really only an appendage. There are tiny little stubs, the hands, and other small protrusions, the legs. As it develops, the human being will transform its little appendages into hands, arms and feet.

How does this come about? How does it occur? The reason lies in the fact that in the earlier embryonic stages the influence of the starry heavens is greater. As the embryo develops and grows during those months in the mother's womb, it becomes increasingly subject to the gravity of the earth. When the world of the stars acts upon man, the emphasis is always on the head. It is gravity that, in time, draws out the other parts. The farther back we go, examining the second or first months of pregnancy, the more do we find these cells exposed to the influence of the stars. As more and more cells appear and millions gradually develop, they become increasingly subject to the forces of the earth.

Here is convincing evidence that the human body is magnificently organized. I would like to make this evident by considering one of the sense organs. I could just as easily take the example of the eye, but today I shall speak about the ear. You see, one of these cells develops into the ear. The ear is set into one of the cavities of the skull bones, and if you examine it properly, you will find that it is quite a remarkable structure. I shall explain the ear so that you can get some idea of it. You will see how such a cell moulds itself while it is still partially under the influence of the stars and partially under the influence of the earth. The ear is formed in such a marvellous way so that man can actually make use of it.

Let us proceed from the outside inward. To begin with, each of you can take hold of your auricle, the outer ear. We have sketched it as seen from the side (1). It consists of gristle and is covered with skin. It is designed to receive the maximum amount of sound. If we had only a hole there, the ear would capture much less sound. You can feel the passage into your ear; it goes into the interior of the so-called tympanic cavity, the interior of the head's bony system. This passage or canal is closed off inside by the eardrum, the tympanic membrane. There is really a thin, delicate, tiny skin attached to this canal, which might be likened to that of a drumhead. The ear, then, is closed off on the inside by the eardrum (2).

I'll continue by drawing the cavity that one observes in a skeleton (3). Here are the skull bones; here are the bones going to the jaw. Inside is a cavity into which this canal leads that is closed off by the eardrum. Behind the outer ear, the auricle, you have a hollow space, which I shall now tell you about. Not only does this canal, this outer passage that you can put your little finger into, lead into the head cavity, but another canal also leads into this cavity from the mouth. In other words, two passages lead into this cavity: one from the exterior that extends inward to the eardrum, and one from the mouth that enters behind the eardrum, which is called the Eustachian tube, though the name does not matter.

Now we come to a strange-looking thing—a veritable snail shell, the cochlea. It consists of two parts. Here is a membrane, and here is a space, the vestibule. Over here is another space, the tympanic cavity. The whole thing is filled with fluid, a living fluid, which I have described to you in another lecture. So within all this fluid is something made of skin that looks like a snail shell. Inside this snail shell, called the cochlea, are myriad little fibres that make up the basilar membrane. This is quite interesting. If you could penetrate the eardrum and look beyond it, you would find this soft snail shell, which is covered on the inside with minute, protruding hair-like fringes.

What, actually, is inside the cochlea? When one approaches the question truly scientifically, one notices that this is really a small piece of intestine that has somehow been placed within the ear. Just as we have the intestines within our abdomen, so do we have a tiny piece of intestine-like skin within our ear. The ear's configuration, then, is such that it contains a little intestine, just as in another part of the body we have a larger intestine. The cochlear duct, which is surrounded by a living fluid called the endolymph, is filled with another called the perilymph. All this is extremely interesting. The cochlea is closed off here by a tiny membrane shaped like an oval window, and here, again, by another little membrane that looks like a round window. Just as we can beat on a drum and make it vibrate, so do the sound waves, coming in from both sides, set into motion this little membrane, the oval window.

The oval window is a membrane set in the middle of the cochlea, and it closes off the inside of the little snail shell, which is filled with the slightly thicker fluid, the perilymph. The fluid on the outside is thinner. Below the oval window is another little membrane called the round window. Here we now approach something marvellous. Two tiny delicate bones sit on the membrane of the oval window. They look like a stirrup and are called the stapes. People also refer to them as the stirrup. So the stirrup sits on the little membrane, protruding in such a way as to resemble an upper and a lower arm on the membrane. Picture such an upper and lower arm of the stirrup and then here, strangely enough, another independent bone, the incus or anvil. The first two bones of the stirrup are connected by a joint; the incus is independent. These tiny bones are all in the ear, and since materialistic science looks at everything superficially, it calls the bone that sits directly on the eardrum, the hammer, this other bit of bone in the middle, the anvil, and this other, the stirrup—or malleus, incus and stapes.

Ordinary science, however, doesn't really know what these bones are. What is found here in the two arms of the stirrup is only a little different from an arm bent at the elbow. See, an elbow joint is the same as this joint of the stirrup above the membrane. And there is a kind of hand, on which sits an independent bone. We don't have such a bone in our hand, but it is comparable to our kneecap. So we can rightfully say that this is also like a leg, a foot; then that would be the thigh, that the knee (sketching), there the foot stands on the membrane, and there is the kneecap.

You see, it is most interesting that in the cavity of the ear we have first a kind of intestine and then a real hand, arm or foot. What is the purpose of all this? Well, imagine that a sound strikes the eardrum and everything in there begins to vibrate. Without being aware of it, the person is determining within the ear what kind of vibration it is. Now think of this, which you may have experienced at some time. You are standing somewhere on a street when something explodes behind you. You feel the explosion inwardly and may feel sick to your stomach from the shock. But this delicate shock that vibrates through the cochlea's “intestine” is felt by the fluid within, which conveys the vibrations that are imparted by the “touching” of the eardrum with a “hand,” as it were.

Now I would like to point out something else to you. What is the purpose of this Eustachian tube leading from the mouth to the inner ear? If sounds simply passed into the ear from the auricle, we would not need it, but to comprehend another's speech we must first have learned to speak ourselves. When we listen to someone else and wish to comprehend him, the sounds we have learned to speak pass through the Eustachian tube. When another person is speaking to us, the sounds come in through the auricle and make the fluid vibrate. Because the air passes into the ear from the outside, and since we know how to set this air in motion with our own speech, we can understand the other person. In the ear, the element of our own speech that we are accustomed to meets the element of what the other person says; there the two meet.

You see, when I say, “house,” I am accustomed to having certain vibrations occur in my Eustachian tube; when I say, “powder,” I experience other vibrations. I am familiar with these vibrations. When I hear the word “house,” the vibration comes from outside, and because I am used to identifying this vibration when I say the word myself, and since my comprehension and the vibration from outside encounter each other in the ear, I am able to recognize its meaning. The tube that leads from the mouth into the ear was there when as a child I learned to speak. Thus, we learned to understand the other person simultaneously as we learned to talk. These matters are most interesting.

Now, things are really like this. Imagine that nothing but what I have just sketched here existed in the ear. Then you could at least understand another person's words and also listen to a piece of music, but you would not be able to remember what you had heard. You would have no memory for speech and sound if the ear had nothing more than these parts. There is another amazing structure in the ear that enables you to retain what you have heard. These are three hollow arches, which look like this (sketching). The second is vertical to the first, and the third, vertical to the second. Thus, they are vertical to each other in three dimensions. These so-called semi-circular canals are hollow and are also filled with a living, delicate fluid. The remarkable thing about it is that infinitely small crystals are constantly forming from it. If you hear the word, “house,” for example, or the tone C, tiny crystals are formed in there as a result. If you hear a different word—“man,” for instance—slightly different crystals are formed. In these three little canals, microscopically small crystals take shape, and these minute crystals enable us not only to understand but also to retain in our memory what we have comprehended. For what does the human being do unconsciously?

Imagine that you have heard someone say, “Five francs.” You want to remember what has been said, so with a pencil you write it into your notebook. What you have written with lead in your notebook has nothing to do with live francs except as a means of remembering them. Likewise, what one hears is inscribed into these delicate canals with the minute crystals that do, in fact, resemble letters, and a subconscious intelligence in us reads them whenever we need to recall something. So, indeed, we can say that the memory for tone and sound is located within these three semi-circular canals. Here where this arm is located is comprehension, intelligence. Here, within the cochlea is a portion of man's feeling. We feel the sounds in this part of the labyrinth, in the fluid within the little snail shell; there we feel the sounds. When we speak and produce the sounds ourselves, our will passes through the Eustachian tube. The whole configuration of the human soul is contained in the ear. In the Eustachian tube lives the will; here in the cochlea is feeling; intelligence is in the auditory ossicles, those little bones that look like an arm or leg; memory resides in the semi-circular canals. So that man can become aware of the complete process, a nerve passes from here (drawing) through this cavity and spreads out everywhere, penetrates everywhere. Through this auditory nerve, all these processes are brought to consciousness in our brain.

You see, gentlemen, this is something quite remarkable. Here in our skull we have a cavity. One enters the inner ear cavity by passing from the auricle through the auditory canal and eardrum. Everything I have described to you is contained therein. First, we stretch out the “hand” and touch the incoming tones to comprehend them. Then we transfer this sensation to the living fluid of the cochlea, where we feel the tone. We penetrate the Eustachian tube with our will, and because of the tiny crystal letters formed in the semi-circular canals, we can recall what has been said or sung, or whatever else has come to us as sound.

So we can say that within the ear we bear something like a little human being, because this little being has will, comprehension, feeling and memory. In this small cavity we carry a tiny man around with us. We really consist of many such minute human beings. The large human being is actually the sum of many little human beings. Later, I'll show you that the eye is also such a miniature man. The nose, too, is a little human being. All these “little men” that make up the total human being are held together by the nervous system.

These miniature men are created while man is still an embryo in the mother's body. All that is being formed and developed there is still under the influence of the stars. After all, these marvellous configurations—the canals that produce the crystals, the little auditory bones—cannot be moulded by the gravity and forces of the earth. They are organized in the womb of the mother by forces that descend from the stars. The cochlea and Eustachian tube are parts that belong to man as a being of earth and are developed later. They are shaped by the forces that originate from the earth, from the gravity that gives us our form and that enables the child to stand upright long after it is born.

You see, if initially one knows how the whole human being originates from one small cell, and how one cell is transformed into an eye while another becomes an ear and a third the nose, one understands how man is gradually built up. Actually, there are ten groups of cells that transform themselves, not just one, but we may still imagine there to be one cell in the beginning. So, at first, just one cell exists. This produces a second, which by being placed in a slightly different position comes under a different influence and develops into the ear. Another develops into the nose, a third into the eye, and so on. None of this proceeds from any influence of the earth. The forces of the earth can mould only those parts that are mostly round, just as in the abdomen the earth organizes the intestinal system. Everything else is formed by the influence of the stars.

We know of these matters today because we have microscopes. After all, the auditory bones are minute. Remarkably enough, these things were also known by men in ancient times, though the source of their knowledge was completely different from that of today. For example, 3,000 years ago the ancient Egyptians were also occupied with a knowledge of man's organization and knew in their way just how remarkable the inner functions of the human ear are. They said to themselves that man has ears, eyes and other organs belonging to the head. If we wish to explain them, we must ask how the ear, for instance, was moulded so differently from the other organs. The ancients said that those organs that are part of the head developed primarily from what comes down to the earth from above. They said, “High up in the air the eagle develops and matures. One must look up into that region if one wishes to observe the forces that form the organs in the human head.” So, these ancient people drew an eagle in place of the head when they were depicting the human being.

When we observe the heart or lungs, we find that they look completely different from the ear or eye. When we look at the lungs, we cannot turn to the stars, nor can we do so in the case of the heart. The force of the stars works strongly in the heart, but we cannot deduce the heart's configuration solely from the stars. The ancient Egyptians knew this; they knew that these organs could not be as closely linked to the stars as those of the head. They pondered these aspects and asked themselves which animal's constitution emphasized the organs similar to the human heart and lungs. The eagle particularly develops those organs that man has in his head.

The ancients thought that the animal that primarily develops the heart, that is all heart and therefore the most courageous, is the lion. So they named the section of man that contains the heart and lungs “lion.” For the head, they said “eagle,” and for the midsection, “lion.”

They realized that man's intestines were again organs of a different kind. You see, the lion has quite short intestines; their development is curtailed. The minute “intestine” in the human ear is formed most delicately, but man's abdominal intestines are by no means shaped so finely. In observing the intestines, you can compare their formation only with the nature of those animals that are mainly under their influence. The lion is under the influence of the heart, and the eagle is under the sway of the upper forces. When you observe cows after they have been grazing, you can sense how they and their kind are completely governed by their intestines. When they are digesting, they experience great well-being, so the ancients called the section of man that constitutes the digestive system, “bull.” That gives us the three members of human nature: Eagle—head; lion—breast; bull—abdomen.

Of course, the ancients knew when they studied the head that it was not an actual eagle, nor the midsection a lion, nor the lower part a bull. They knew that, and they said that if there were no other influence, we would all go about with something like an eagle for our head above, a lion in our chest region and a bull down below; we would all walk around like that. But something else comes into play that transforms what is above and moulds it into a human head, and likewise with the other parts. This agent is man himself; man combines these three aspects.

It is most remarkable how these ancient people expressed, in such symbols, certain truths that we acknowledge again today. Of course, they could form these images easier than we because, though we modern people may learn many things, the thoughts we normally acquire in school do not touch our hearts too deeply. It was quite different in the case of these ancient people. They were seized by the feeling emanating from thoughts and therefore dreamed of them. These people dreamed true dreams. The whole human being appeared as an image to them, and from his forehead they saw an eagle looking out, from the heart, a lion, and from the abdomen, a bull. They combined this into the beautiful image of the whole human being. One can truly say that long-ago people composed their concept of the human being from the elements of man, bull, eagle and lion.

This outlook continued in the description of the Gospels. One frequently proceeded from this point of view. One said that in the Gospel of Matthew the humanity of Jesus is truly described; hence, its author was called “man.” Then take the case of John, who depicts Jesus as if He hovered or flew over the earth. John actually describes what happens in the region of the head; he is the “eagle.” When one examines the Gospel of Mark, one will find that he presents Jesus as a fighter, the valiant one; hence, the “lion.” Mark writes like one who represents primarily those organs of man situated in the chest. How does Luke write? Luke is presented as a physician, as a man whose main goal is therapeutic, and the healing element can be recognized in his Gospel. Healing is accomplished by bringing remedial forces into the digestive organs. Consequently, Luke describes Jesus as the one who brings a healing element into the lower nature of man. Luke, then, is the “bull.” So one can picture the four Gospels like this: Matthew—man; Mark—lion; Luke—bull; John—eagle.

As for the journal whose cover depicts the four figures that you asked about, its purpose is to present something of value that can be communicated from one human spirit to another. So the true human being should be depicted in it. In rendering this drawing, the eagle is represented above, then the lion and bull, with man encompassing them all. This was done to show that the journal represents a serious concern with man. This is its aim. Not much of the human element is present in the bulk of what newspapers print these days. Here attention was to be drawn to the fact that this newspaper or journal could afford man the opportunity to express himself fully. What he says must not be stupid: the eagle. He must not be a coward: the lion. Nor should he lose himself in fanciful flights of thought but rather stand firmly on earth and be practical: the bull. The final result should be “man,” and it should speak to man. This is what one would like to see happen, that everything passed on from man to man be conducted on a human level.

Well, I did have time after all to get to your question after looking at those subjects I started with. I hope my answer was comprehensible. Were you interested in the description of the ear? One should know these things; one should be familiar with what is contained in the various organs that one carries around within the body.

Question: Is there time to say something about the “lotus flowers” that are sometimes mentioned?

Dr. Steiner: I'll get to that when I describe the individual organs to you.

Dr. Steiner. Gentlemen, someone has handed in a written question concerning the thyroid gland.

Question: The thyroid gland can become enlarged and when it does a goitre is formed. Since goitres may exert pressure on the windpipe and thus cause a problem, operations have been performed on this gland, whose function is unknown. Soon after surgery, however, a strange phenomenon was observed. Persons whose whole thyroid gland had been removed exhibited both physical and mental changes. Growth stopped, limbs became enlarged and perspiration ceased. There also was evidence of some mental retardation. When the cause for this was realized, one sought to remedy the defects by feeding the unfortunate persons thyroid glands taken from freshly slaughtered calves or wethers. The result was astonishing. All negative effects subsided. But these results were short-lived, and within a few weeks the trend was reversed again. The patient's stomach also rebelled. Then sections of thyroid glands were introduced into the throat. Again, the results were amazing, but signs of deterioration reappeared.

Injections made with preparations from thyroid glands were not much more successful. An English firm has achieved surprising results with certain tablets even in cases of cretinism. A short interruption in their use, however, reverses the process of recovery. What is to be expected with the continued use of these tablets?

Dr. Steiner: Gentlemen, if you take into consideration what we have already discussed here, you will be able to understand this matter fairly well. You see, until about seventy years ago, until about the middle of the nineteenth century, no particular significance was attached to the thyroid gland, which is located here in the front of the neck. It was thought to be like the appendix or some other organ that had had a function in man's ancestors but was no longer needed. In short, no special importance was attributed to this gland. Then it was noted that its degeneration, with the formation of a goitre, had a specific effect even on mental faculties. Its purpose and pathological enlargements were studied in cretins, that is, retarded and mentally deficient people. One can observe that in certain geographic regions persons are both retarded and afflicted with goitres. It is known throughout Europe that in Halberstadt the retarded population has goitres so large that in some cases they extend over the shoulders.

Now, it was thought at first that if pathological enlargement of the thyroid had such a pronounced influence on the mental faculties, surgical removal was indicated. This is how they think today. A great preference is shown for surgery because significant progress was made in surgical methods in the nineteenth century; this has become the most important aspect of medicine, that most deserving of recognition. So the first thought is to remove those organs that apparently have no significance. This is the procedure followed in the case of the appendix. It is surgically removed if it shows any pathological symptoms.

This manner of thinking ignores something I have repeatedly emphasized here. You will recall that when you observe man in his totality, you often note that something is present in certain processes of the child that has effects much later on, even in advanced age. Ordinary medical opinions are concerned only with what is demanded at the moment. Therefore, steps are taken that seem most beneficial at the given moment, but no attention is paid to the future course of events. It is difficult to make an overall judgment about these matters because, if a patient is not operated on when he exhibits symptoms of appendicitis, for example, he may immediately succumb. Then, of course, the doctor is held responsible. The point is to investigate other than surgical means to solve these problems. You are familiar, perhaps, with the fad these days of letting youngsters go about as much as possible with bare feet and legs, even up to the knees. Well, this habit contributes to the degeneration of the appendix! Of course, once the appendix has become inflamed, it must be removed, but when you see matters in a larger context, you know how to prevent such problems from arising in the first place.

Now, it is correct that the thyroid gland has great significance and important implications for the whole human organism. As I have said, people have been aware of this since the last half of the nineteenth century. They know that a malfunctioning thyroid does not allow the use of the body for mental activities in a normal way. Everything referred to in the question actually occurred. If a portion of the gland was allowed to remain, the patient did, indeed, make some improvement. He was relieved of the enlargement and his mentality was not adversely affected. But when the whole thyroid was removed and nothing of the gland remained, the patient became more retarded than before. Naturally, it was learned from this that even a diseased thyroid gland has significance for the expression of man's faculties of soul and spirit.

The secretion of the thyroid has been administered to patients in a number of ways. Incidentally, the fluid contained in a gland is called a secretion. Injections of thyroid substance could result in an increase of thyroid fluid in the body, but this method led to no lasting improvement. The organization of the body did not seem to respond favourably to what was being administered. So far, the best results have been obtained by administering thyroid fluid in the form of these tablets, which are absorbed by the digestive system. Introducing the substance of the thyroid into the stomach and hence into the blood stream permeates the body with the secretion of this gland. This remedy proves that the body needs such a secretion. It shows, too, that when the thyroid is functioning properly, its secretion passes into the blood in minute amounts and penetrates the entire body. If the thyroid secretion is introduced into the stomach rather than directly into the body, it also finds its way into the blood stream. But you understand, of course, that administering thyroid by way of the stomach is effective only as long as it comes to circulate in the blood. If the tablets are discontinued, the amount of thyroid in the blood will decrease. So persons who receive thyroid substance in this manner must take it continually. Then it does remain effective.

It can be said that this does, indeed, offer concrete proof for materialism because we see that we only need to administer certain substances to man in order to increase his mental faculties. The same is true when the substance is manufactured within the body, as is the case with thyroid secretion. By thoroughly checking into all the experiments made in this area, however, we discover something else.

Thyroid glands are quite large, as you may know, and are located in the front of the neck. Within them are many small glands, to the right and left, that are no bigger than the head of a pin. They secrete a substance that is produced also in other parts of the body. Similar, but not identical, substances are secreted by small glands in various parts of the body. Though it differs from the substance produced in the small glands of the thyroid, such a substance, for instance, is secreted in the adrenal glands. Tiny glands like these are found in other parts of the body as well. In other words, the body contains traces of substances secreted in various parts of its organization. These substances are called hormones. Such a hormone that permeates the body in minute amounts is also contained in the tiny glands within the thyroid.

You may picture it this way. If you take a fish out of its watery environment, it will die because it cannot exist in air. Likewise, these hormonal glands, which resemble minute living organisms, can survive only within the thyroid, the real purpose of which is to provide a place where they can function. When the thyroid is surgically removed, the body is deprived of the hormones it produces. If these minute glands are removed with the thyroid, the prognosis is negative, but if enough of the thyroid containing them remains, then things don't look so bad. Enough must be left to permit some of these small glands to continue to function. When the entire thyroid gland is cut out, the hormone producing glands are also removed and that is harmful. Less radical surgery that doesn't remove them all is successful. Preferably, then, just parts of the thyroid should be removed; the hormonal glands should be allowed to remain. But, if the secretion from the missing amount of thyroid substance containing these glands is replaced with tablets, so that the blood receives what it needs from them and also from passing through the remaining glands, the patient's general state of health may be expected to improve. The matter is really rather complicated, and much depends on how the thyroid secretion is produced.

When an experiment is performed on a wether in which only part of the thyroid is removed, leaving behind the part containing the hormonal glands, then it is found that the secretion does not have the medicinal value it would have had the entire gland been removed. When the entire gland is taken, however, the hormone produced by the hormonal glands combines with the thyroid secretion, permeating the blood of the thyroid, and an effective extract can be obtained. But, if only parts of the wether's thyroid is removed, leaving the hormonal glands behind, the thyroid extract will be less effective; then, such tablets will not work as well. So you see that not everything depends on the thyroid gland as such. Its purpose is only to nourish the minute hormonal glands, which, as you can imagine, were not discovered for a long time. Being so small, how could they have been noticed?

From all this you can understand that man's well-being simply requires certain substances. You need only recall that his mental faculties are altered also when he drinks wine, for instance. Cheerfulness is engendered by drinking wine but, later, things are likely to change. The next day his mood is usually quite the opposite of cheerfulness! So it is with this substance that is contained in the hormonal glands and that are required in minute amounts throughout man's body. He makes use of this substance, and animals need it, too. Much can be accomplished by working with such substances in the organism.

Well, in recent times, this has led to a more attentive examination of these delicate substances. What is the basis of the efficacy of such substances as those secreted by the hormonal glands? Gentlemen, you can understand this only when you realize that the body is constantly subject to processes of deterioration. It is a peculiarity of the organism that harmful substances are forever being formed in it. The substances secreted by the hormonal glands neutralize the destructive effect of these poisons that form in the body. It is a most interesting phenomenon that the processes of life consist in man's constantly poisoning himself, and then continuously counteracting the effects of the poisons by means of these little glands placed within his system. Take the case of the adrenal glands. If those little hormonal glands work properly, man appears the way you all look. But when they malfunction, his complexion turns brown, a yellowish brown. Such an affliction is called Addison's disease, because a Dr. Addison was the first to observe it. We once had such a patient who was a member of our society and who was looking for a cure here. This brown discoloration and darkening of the skin is caused by certain harmful substances in the body that are not neutralized by those substances normally produced in the adrenal glands. Likewise, mental retardation is caused by a lack of the substances normally produced in the hormonal glands of the thyroid.

When administered in tablets, hormones that act as antidotes are transmitted to the body, and their effects have led doctors to pay closer attention to this entire sphere of problems. It is interesting that this question also arises in connection with Steinach's Theory. Since this theory is somewhat related to our topic, it will be worthwhile to consider them together. Steinach's theory is just about ten years old now. About ten years ago, a professor in Vienna sent a report of his experiments to the Academy of Sciences. Now known as Steinach's theory, the report is based on the fact that the body is continually permeated with hormones, the products of minutely small glands. It is interesting that the body seems to be constantly out to poison itself by its organs, but tiny glands located everywhere in the system produce antidotes. Starting at the neck, we have the hormonal glands of the thyroid, which enable us to speak rather than to stammer, and to connect thoughts with our speech. The hormones produced in the adrenal glands prevent us from turning dark and they ensure our attractive light complexion. Also, hormonal glands of the reproductive organs emit small amounts of delicate fluid. These glands, of the gonads, are found in animals and humans, both male and female. They are only slightly developed in the child, but when he or she reaches puberty in the fourteenth or fifteenth year, they become fully developed. In the case of the male, the gonads or testes are located in the scrotum. They contain small hormonal glands whose secretion penetrates the whole blood circulation in minute dispersion.

Steinach's experiments have demonstrated that this particular hormone has the characteristic of suppressing the aging process. Scientists have been concerned with aging for a long time, and long before Steinach's theory became known, a physician-scientist in Paris named Metschnikoff published some interesting things about the phenomena of old age. His point of departure was that the body continually poisons itself. He emphasized the fact that poisons are constantly accumulating in the intestines and that man ages from the effect of the microscopically small animal- or plant-like creatures that produce them.

Now, Steinach concluded that the aging process, this quite natural and normal process of deterioration, can be counteracted. He conducted his experiments mainly with rats; the most important tests were with rats. In cases like these, it must be said that experiments with animals are not completely applicable to humans. Not everything that occurs in animals, especially in rats, can be applied unreservedly to man. After all, the organism of the animal is different from that of man, and I must say, even if one has a low opinion of the size of the human being when compared, for example, with the vastness of the universe, yet a difference does exist between the physical organism of a human and a rat.

Most of the scientific results were obtained, as I have said, through experimentation on rats, which are particularly suitable for such tests. You see, the normal life span of the rat is about two and a half years, and before it dies it exhibits quite pronounced signs of aging. Rats are quite agile and aggressive creatures, and when they age, they turn dull and listless. They lose their fur in some spots and become bald; in other spots, their fur turns bristly and ragged. Also, they lose their appetite. Their age is shown particularly in that, when males are locked together in a cage, they don't fight but keep to themselves, and when an aging male rat is placed with a female, it shows no interest in her.

Of course, one has to be careful with such experiments because rats are susceptible to all kinds of disease. They easily become tubercular and frequently become infested with tape worms or other intestinal parasites. Also, rats are subject to infectious diseases. Therefore, if a rat exhibits the symptoms I have described, it must be determined whether they are caused by such diseases or are truly signs of old age. So to conduct such experiments with rats one must start with quite a number and constantly examine them for intestinal parasites. Those with coarse fur or loss of hair due to illness must be eliminated. Eventually, you will be left with a few rats that are truly old.

Steinach experimented primarily with male rats. The aging males that were listless and had bald spots, that had lost hair and were no longer interested in the females, were treated in the following manner. When not breeding, the gonad of the male rat is found above the scrotum. This gland constantly discharges fluid into tiny canals. It can be pictured like this (drawing). Minute canals lead from the gonad into the spermatic cord, from which the semen is discharged. The hormone of the gonad passes through this canal and is mixed with the seminal fluid, which becomes permeated with the hormone. When the animal is young, this gland produces the hormone that passes through these canals, or vasa deferentia. From them, it enters the spermatic cord, so that the semen ejaculated by the male that impregnates the female contains this hormone. It is also diffused throughout the body. The principal part of the hormone flows into the spermatic cord, while the rest is distributed in minute amounts throughout the rat's organism by the blood.

Let us now take the case of a rat that is getting old and feeble. The feebleness and slackness of the body is indicated in that it can no longer control its excretory functions, having lost control over them. You may have heard that this happens to people who are executed. This is what happens when the body becomes slack. When the organism ages, too much of this hormone flows into the spermatic cord, and too little is retained in the body. The body then contains the toxic substances of advanced age because the gonadal hormone is lacking and therefore not effective as an antidote. This explains why the rat's organism ages in the first place. It ages because various toxic substances produced in the body come to permeate it.

When a child reaches puberty much of the hormonal substance passes into the body. This is not the main point, however. Because the organism is young and vigorous, it can retain the hormone it receives and allow the surplus to be discharged.

Now, when the rat grows old, too much of the hormone is discharged. So Steinach tied off the tiny canal with a small thread, thus closing the passage from the gonad to the spermatic cord. Since the hormone now could not leave the gonad, it entered the body through the blood. You understand how that worked, don't you? When you shut off a pipe, the fluid backs up. He closed it off here (indicating drawing), made a ligature, as it is called, and thus caused all of the hormone to penetrate the body. The rat became lively again and even grew new hair. When it was put with females, it showed sexual desire and attacked them, though it could no longer impregnate them because the operation had rendered it sterile. This was really what happened.

You see, it is actually quite simple. The aging body lets too much hormone escape, but because of ligation it is retained and the aging process is reversed, even if only temporarily. It is quite interesting to observe how these male rats become agile and youthful again after the ligature is made in the spot I have indicated. These ligatures can be made in a variety of ways. The way I have just drawn it is a method that is rather complicated because an operation must be performed to reach this spot. First, an incision must be made on the outside, then the thread must be inserted around the canal to tie it off. Experiments have been performed in other ways, too. For example, the testicles, particularly in the case of humans, were destroyed with X-rays, thereby holding back the gonadal hormone. In short, all of these tests are based on somehow retaining the hormone in the organism. You see here the similarity with the thyroid gland. In it, too, it is a question of getting the hormone into the blood. It is the same with the gonadal hormone, except here it is done by closing this canal when a person has become incontinent in old age.

Steinach has successfully continued these experiments over the past ten years and today it can indeed be asserted that what was proven to occur in rats applies also to a certain extent in humans. Such experiments have been made on humans and similar results obtained by using ligatures or by introducing the hormones of a young person directly into the gonads. This has been done with injections or by injecting directly into the testicles the seminal fluid of a young animal. In other words, all kinds of ways have been tried to reintroduce this hormone into the body. Results have indeed been attained, and although they have been generally somewhat exaggerated, they cannot be denied. Experiments were, in fact, performed not only on rats but also on old people who had become feeble; they then regained some youthfulness. Of course, the effect doesn't last too long. The human body can live only a certain number of years and it is not at all certain yet whether the life span can be lengthened by these means. A man can be somewhat rejuvenated but, at present, one cannot lengthen his life. It is feasible, however, that the life span, too, will eventually be lengthened this way.

You understand, though, that all these matters also have their negative aspects. It is true, is it not, that some people are poor sleepers? If one treats young people who do not sleep well with sleeping pills of opium or morphine, they will certainly sleep better, no doubt about it. One can't argue against it, but the fact is that if sleeping pills and related chemical medication is administered repeatedly to young people, it will, after a while, weaken the body. It will have an increasing need for the medication and will come to be unable to live without it, thus becoming addicted to it. Then, in later life, one will have to deal with a person who is not in full possession of his health. So it is much better to try to cure insomnia by psychological means, combatting it in a more inward way. If the patient is encouraged to think and concentrate on one word, he will gradually gain the strength from within to fall asleep. This method is much better because, this way, man does not weaken himself. The effects of sleeping pills are uncontested; it is indisputable that a person sleeps better with them, but it should really be considered from another aspect. One should try to induce sleep from an inward, mental direction. Of course, this method is more difficult and is related somewhat to education. If children are raised correctly, they can easily be induced to get the right amount of sleep every night. Then later in life people needn't be given sleeping pills if they have been treated properly in school.

These rejuvenation methods can really be compared to taking sleeping pills. Yes, gentlemen, the following is of particular interest. I have told you that Metschnikoff had already dealt with the symptoms of old age; as yet, Steinach's experiments were unknown. You may be surprised to learn that a thoroughly materialistic doctor recommended that his patients read things like Goethe's Faust! Really, they were told to read books like Faust; this was supposed to rejuvenate them.

There is much truth in this recommendation. If in old age one has an interest that completely occupies one's soul and spirit, something that fills one with enthusiasm, this will make one youthful. The meaning of “enthusiasm” is close to that of “inspiration.” Something spiritual enters the mind. Otherwise, the term used would not be “enthusiasm” but “embodiment,” which connotes a material process. When addressing the public, even materialists do not say, “Let us be full of embodiment!” Though they deny the spirit they nevertheless say, “Let us be full of enthusiasm!” Being filled with enthusiasm is indeed a source of rejuvenation. Of course, one cannot prove this in rats! It is a source of rejuvenation in humans, however, and if observations in life were made in this direction, one would discover that, depending upon a man's health and stamina, whatever rejuvenation could be brought about would be attained much more easily if he could be allowed sufficient time to engage in some mental activity. Mental or spiritual activity has the peculiar effect of holding together and keeping strong the glandular walls. If a man is interested only in superficial matters all his life, his glands and vascular walls tend to become slack more quickly than if he has an interest in spiritual and mental activities. If he has been educated correctly as a child, and then given enough time to permeate himself rightly with spirit, he will not need such ligatures because he will maintain his strength on his own and his body will retain what it requires.

It is a different matter with the thyroid gland. Here, medical means must quite often be resorted to because it is extremely complicated to improve it with, well, spiritual means. Yet, here, too, results will be attained and have, in fact, already been achieved. If a patient repeats certain sayings day after day in a song-like speech, carefully prescribed in a definite way, the size of the thyroid gland will decrease.

So it must be said that hormone therapy is just as effective as medications are for insomnia. It would be better, however, if humans would at last begin to think about accomplishing things in other than just materialistic ways and would finally consider giving civilization the opportunity that would afford everyone a chance for a certain degree of spiritual activity. Then these manipulations wouldn't be valued quite so highly, because it would be recognized that one becomes feeble in old age in the first place because of the negative aspects of our civilization. All these operations on humans that give them a few months of rejuvenation in old age basically serve only to equalize what has already been damaged. From the medical standpoint it is a brilliant, remarkable accomplishment, but when it is viewed in a larger cultural context, one sees its darker side as well.

Of course, we must consider something else, too. I said earlier that administering sleeping pills to younger persons actually weakens them. If rejuvenation treatments are resorted to in elderly persons who are shrivelled up and can barely grope about, it is naturally a source of great happiness for them to be able to act a bit lively once more. One doesn't have to be quite so concerned that such a rejuvenation treatment could be harmful to them because it is performed at an age when it becomes difficult to check for any damaging after effects.

Our materialistic world conception is attaining remarkable results today, but when they are seen in a larger cultural context, they take on a different appearance. This is why I always stress that people should be concerned with protecting children in school, and also in later years, to prevent them from getting premature symptoms of old age. This problem is not confined to a certain segment of society. Nowadays people hardly thirty run around with terribly bald heads, particularly those who belong to the so-called affluent professions. Premature baldness is caused by the unnatural forms of higher education. It would be much wiser to educate people in such a way that the body would be in a position to maintain everything for as long as it retains its life forces.

This is what I can tell you about these matters. It is always interesting to view such things from both sides, which, indeed, they have. Anything else concerning this I shall talk about another time.

Dr. Steiner: Well, gentlemen, perhaps one of you has a question you would like to ask me today.

Question: I would like to know why people with blond hair are becoming increasingly scarce. Formerly, there were many fair-haired people in the region where I was born, but now there are far fewer. Why is this so?

Dr. Steiner: Your question fits quite well into our discussions, and I can consider it after I describe the human eye for you, as I promised to do earlier. We have already studied the ear; now we shall look at the eye. You may have noticed that blond hair is closely linked with blue eyes; as a rule, blonds have blue eyes. Your question relates to this matter, which you will understand fully when we examine the eye.

Eyes have great significance, indeed, for the human being. It might be assumed that people born blind do not benefit at all from the eyes; nevertheless, they are still part of them, and they have the function not only of seeing but also of influencing the entire nervous system, inasmuch as this originates in the brain. The eyes are still there in one who is born blind even though they cannot see. It is placed in the socket but something is wrong internally, especially with the optic nerve. In addition, the muscles that control eye movements exist also in a blind person, and actually continuously influence the nervous system. Thus, the eye is, indeed, one of the most important organs of our body.

The eye, which is really like a miniature world, is placed in a cavity formed by the skull bones. You might tell yourself that it is something like a tiny world. The optic nerve fills out the retina and terminates in the brain, which I shall outline here (sketching). So, if this is the eye seen in profile and sitting in the eye-socket, then here on the right is a canal through which the optic nerve passes. The eyeball lies buried in fatty tissue and is surrounded by bony walls. Attached to it are six ocular muscles that extend back into the bony walls of the socket. These bones are directly behind the upper jawbone.

In the anterior part of the eye is a completely transparent, clear tissue through which light passes. That the tissue looks black is an illusion; in reality, you see through the eye to its rear wall; you are looking through the transparent skin all the way to the back of the eye. The round blackness you see is the pupil, which looks black because the back of the eyeball is that colour. It is like looking through the window of a dark room; if you think the window itself is black, you are mistaken. The interior of the eye is completely transparent. This tissue is tough and opaque here and transparent in front. Within it and toward the rear is another layer of tissue possessing a network of fine, delicate blood vessels, which thicken here. Around the pupil is the iris, which in some people is blue and in others gray, green, brown or black.

Between the iris and the transparent tissue is a transparent fluid. Where you see the round blackness is the transparent skin, the cornea; behind that is the anterior chamber. It consists of living fluid and is shaped somewhat like a little glass lens. The actual lens of the eye is located here, where these delicate blood vessels come together and where the iris is formed. This structure, called the crystalline lens, also contains a living fluid. Its outer cover is transparent, permitting you to see the blackness behind it. Unlike a glass lens, it is mobile; it moves especially when you need to focus on something nearby. In that event, it is shaped like this (sketching), thick in the middle. When you need to look into the distance, it is bent like this, thin in the middle.

Next to the iris are delicate little muscles, which we tense to make the lens thicker when looking at something close up, or relax to make the lens thinner. A person's living habits also affect the lenses. If you often use your eyes for close work, like reading or writing, gradually the lenses become permanently thick in the middle, and you become near-sighted. If you are a hunter, however, frequently looking into the distance, then the lenses become thin in the middle and you will become far-sighted. Another thing to consider is that in youth the tiny muscles located in and around the iris are still strong and elastic, and we can accommodate to our field of vision. In old age they become slack. This explains why many people become far-sighted with age, but this problem can be corrected. If a person's lenses are too thick in the middle, glasses are prescribed with lenses that are concave. These will compensate for the thickness of the eye's lenses. Some people even have a twofold problem, needing one set of glasses for clear distance vision and another set for close up. If the lenses of the eyes are too thin, the glasses will have convex lenses. Their thickness is added to the lens of the eye and compensates for the defect. You could say that we are able to see because we can correct the defect of the lens. The lens in our eye is like that of our glasses: near- and far-sighted. But the lens in our glasses stays the same, while that in the eye is living and can adjust and accommodate itself.

Behind the lens is also something like a living fluid. It, too, is completely transparent, permitting light to pass through everywhere. This gelatinous and crystalline substance completely fills the interior of the eyeball. So here in front is something like transparent “hard water,” the aqueous humour; next comes the transparent lens, and then comes the vitreous humour, which is also transparent. The optic nerve enters the eye here, and reaches approximately to here.

This optic nerve is extremely complicated. I have drawn it as if the main nerve fibre simply divides here, but there's more to it than this. There are actually four layers of nerves surrounding the vitreous humour. This is the outer layer of the nerve (sketching), which acts like a strong mirror. When light enters the eye and hits the layers of the retina, it is reflected everywhere. It does not go into this (probably referring to the nerve canal) but stays in the eye. The outer layer acts like the wall of a mirror and reflects the light. A second layer of nerves intensifies this reflecting capacity. As we have said, the nerve that lines our eyeball consists of four layers. The outermost layer and the second outer layer reflect back all the light into the interior sphere. Thus, within the vitreous humour we have actually only reflected light. A third layer of nerves consists of the same substance that makes up the gray matter of our brain. The outer parts of our brain are gray matter, not white. Another “skin” constitutes the fourth layer. You see, the vitreous humour is placed within a complicated “sack.” This enables all the light that penetrates into the interior of the eyeball to be reflected within the vitreous humour and to live therein.

What we have in our eye is something that looks like a complicated physical apparatus. What is it for? Well, imagine that a man is standing somewhere. When you look at him, an inverted picture is produced in your eye because of the lens and vitreous humour. So, if a man stands there (sketching), you have a small image of him in the eye, but owing to this apparatus, it is an image that stands on its head. The eye is just like a camera in this respect; it is much like a photographic apparatus in which the object photographed appears in an image upside down. That also happens in the eye; since it is a mirroring device, when light enters, it is reflected. Thus, in the eye we have the image of a little man. Even with all our modern sophisticated machinery, something like the human eye can certainly not be manufactured. We must admit that it is altogether extraordinary and marvellous.

Now, picture to yourselves the starry heaven; form an image of the light-filled sphere around the earth, and then reduce this picture until it is quite small. What you then have is the interior of the human eye. The human eye is actually a world in miniature, and the reflections in the eye resemble myriad surrounding stars. You see, these outer walls do not reflect evenly. There are many tiny bodies, which, like miniature stars, radiate light toward the centre. If we were as small as the image of the human being in the eye and could examine it from inside, its interior would seem infinitely large. Our impression would be the same as when on earth we look up to the glittering stars at night. It is indeed so. It is interesting that the eye is like a miniature world and that the tiny human image produced in the eye by reflections would have the same feeling, if it were conscious, we have at night under a starry sky. It is really quite interesting!

Well, I said, “... if that image possessed consciousness.” But if we did not possess our eyes, we would not be able to view the starry night. We see the night sky and its brilliant stars only because we have eyes; if we close them, we do not see the stars. Nor could we see the starry firmament if the eye did not already contain within it a miniature world. We say to ourselves that this miniature universe really signifies a big world. This is something that must be clearly understood.

Imagine that a man shows you a small photograph of himself or another person. You will realize that even though it is small it was taken of a regular-sized man. You are not encountering the actual person in this picture and, likewise in the eye; in reality you have only this tiny miniature starry sky within you. You then say to yourself, “What I have here before me is the `photograph' of the immense starry sky.” You do this all the time. You have within you the little starry sky of the eye, and then you tell yourself, “This is the photograph of the great starry sky.” You actually always picture the real starry sky from the miniature firmament in your eye; you conceive of the universe by means of this picture within. What you really experience is the infinitesimal firmament in the eye.

Now you might say, “Yes, but this would be true only if we possessed just one eye like the cyclops, whereas we have two eyes.” Well, why do we have two? Try this: Look at something with only one eye. It will appear to be painted on a backdrop. We do not have two images of an object, which we see in proportion and in the right dimensions only because we possess two eyes. Seeing with both eyes is like grabbing your right hand with your left. We are conscious of ourselves because from childhood we have been used to saying “I” to ourselves. The little word, “I,” would not be in the language if our right side were not aware of our left. We would not be conscious of ourselves. We become so accustomed to the most important things that we take them as a matter of course. A hidebound philistine would say, “The question of why one says “I” to oneself does not interest me. It goes without saying that one says “I” to oneself!” Well, he is a narrow-minded and prosaic person. He does not realize that most subtle matters are based on the most complicated processes. He does not know that he became used to touching himself as a child, that is, touching his left hand with his right, and thus grew accustomed to saying “I” to himself.

This fact can be traced in human culture. If we go back to ancient times, to the days of the Old Testament, for instance, we find priests who—excuse me for voicing such a heretical opinion—often knew much more than the priests nowadays and who said, “We want to teach man self-awareness.” So they taught people to fold their hands. This is the origin of folding your hands. Man touched himself in order to find the strong ego within him and to develop his will. Things like this are not said today because they are not understood. Priests today simply tell members of the congregation to fold their hands in prayer; they do not give the meaning of this gesture because they themselves do not know it anymore.

When we see with our two eyes, we feel that what is there in the light is in fact spatial. If we had only one eye, everything would appear as if painted on the firmament. Our two eyes enable us to see things in three dimensions and to experience ourselves as standing within the centre of the world. In a good or bad sense, every man considers himself to be the centre of the world. Therefore, it is of great importance that we have two eyes.

Now, since it is so important for man to use his eyes for seeing, we overlook something else about them. We are not so ignorant in the case of the ear. I believe I have mentioned already that when we hear we also speak; that is, we ourselves produce what we hear. We can understand a spoken language only because of the Eustachian tube, which runs from the mouth into the ear. You surely know that children born deaf cannot speak either, and that people who are not taught to speak a language cannot understand it either. Special means must be used to gain an understanding of what has been heard.

It does indeed appear that seeing is the only purpose of the eye, but a child learns not only to see with its eyes but also to speak with them, even if we don't pay much attention to it. The language of the eyes is not as suitable for everyday use as is the language directed to the ears, but with it you can discover whether a person is telling a lie or the truth. If you are the least bit sensitive, you can discover in the way he looks at you whether or not he is telling you the truth. The eyes do speak, and the child learns to speak with them just as it does with its mouth.

In the language of the ear the larynx, with its function of uttering sounds is separated from it, and thus there are here two separate aspects. In the case of the language of the eye, there are muscles right within the organ and also around it. It is the muscles that make the eye into a kind of visible organ of speech. Whether we look somebody straight in the eye, or have a shifty look, depends on the muscles that surround the eyeball. In the case of the ear, it is as if it were contained within the larynx, as in fishes. In man the ear is separated from the larynx, but in fishes they are joined to form one organ. The act of speaking is separated from hearing, but with the eye it is as if the larynx with its muscles surrounded the ear. The eye is situated within its speech organ as if the ear were placed within the larynx. In humans it is like this (sketching). Here we have the larynx, the voice box, which goes down through the windpipe into the lungs and up into the palate. It enables us to speak. From the mouth we have a connection with the ear.

Now imagine that the larynx is not like it is in humans but that it spreads out much wider. Then we would have the broad larynx that Lucifer possesses in my wooden statue. The larynx is so large that the head fits in between, and it reaches up on both sides to surround the ear. With this organ we would both speak and hear. With the eye we do just that; we speak through the muscles that surround the eyeball, and through the eye we simultaneously see. So in some respects the eye is conceived like the ear, but in other respects it is, of course, quite different. This, then, is the purpose of the muscles I have drawn here.

We can say that we speak of what we know, and we consider those who say things of which they know nothing to be more or less fools. We say of such people that they are talking to themselves, shooting off their mouths. As a rule, however, sensible and rational people express what they know. We do not speak consciously with the eye, however, for we would have to be shrewd fellows, indeed, if we could consciously speak the language of the eyes. This process is unconscious and accompanies our other behaviour. The people in Southern Italy, for example, still speak of an “evil eye.” They still know that a person who has a certain look about him is false. They talk of an evil eye because they sense that the eye expresses the whole nature of a man without his being aware of it. This superstition in Southern Italy goes so far that some hang little charms or religious medals around their necks as protection from it.

So you see how marvellously the eye is formed. A person who studies the eye in this way simply cannot say that there is nothing of the soul in it. It is simply stupid and philistine to say that the eye has no element of the soul. People say that light penetrates through the pupil into the eye, passes through the lens into the vitreous humour, produces an image here on the retina, and then is transmitted into the brain. Modern science stops right there, or it might state further that the light in the brain is used to produce thoughts. This description gives rise to all sorts of nonsensical statements that lead to nothing.

In reality, the light does not reach the brain. I have explained how it is reflected in the eyeball as in a mirror. The light remains in the eye, and it is important to know that it stays there. The interior of the eyeball is like the illuminated starry expanse. The light remains within the eye and does not penetrate directly into the brain. If the light did enter the brain, we would not be able to see anything at all. We can see because it does not do so. Just imagine, gentlemen, that you are standing here in this room all by yourselves; there are no chairs, nothing but the walls. The room is completely illuminated within, but you see nothing. You know only that it is illuminated, but you can see no objects of any kind. If the brain were only filled with light, we would see nothing because it is not solely on account of light that we see. Everywhere the light is kept in the eye and illumines its interior. What does this mean? Well, imagine that we have a little box. I stand with my back to it; I have not seen it before. I must reach behind myself to be able to know that it is there. Likewise, when the eye is illuminated from within, I must first feel the light to know that it is there. I must first feel the light, and this is done with the soul. In other words, the apparatus of the eye produces something we can feel. The soul passes through the muscles and feels or senses the little man I have mentioned within the eye.

Every organ within the human being shows us that here we must say that the soul observes, feels or senses what is within. If we examine everything carefully, we discover the soul and the spirit everywhere, especially in the eye. After a while, we can get the feeling that we are sitting in front of a peephole here (referring to his eye). When I look at you, you appear within, but I form the conception that the image within is the person outside. This is how the eye works. Just imagine that it is a little peephole through which the soul forms the idea that what it observes is the vast world. We simply must recognize the soul's existence when we actually examine the matter.

Now, I said that here is the choroid (referring to his sketch of the eyeball). It contains tiny blood vessels and lies under the optic nerve and its network. The optic nerve does not reach all the way to the front of the eyeball but the choroid, with its muscles, does. It extends to the lens and actually holds it in place. Here, as I have mentioned, is the iris surrounding the black pupil, which is nothing but an aperture. The iris is quite complicated. I will draw it a little larger, as seen from the side. So here is the iris, attached to the ciliary muscle. The choroid and lens sit within, held in place by the iris. Seen from the front, the iris has a front wall and a back wall. On the back wall are little coloured granules, which are microscopically small sacks. In everyone they are filled with a blue substance, and this is what one sees in blue-eyed people. In their case, the front layer is transparent, so you see the back layer of the iris, which is filled with this blue substance. In a blue-eyed person you are really seeing the back wall of the iris; the front part is transparent. Brown-eyed people have the same blue substance in the back layer of their iris, but they possess also brown granules in front of it. These cover up the blue ones so that all you see are the brown. A black-eyed person has black granules. You see not the blue but the little black sacks. It is the iris that causes a person's eyes to be blue, brown or black. The iris is always blue in back, and in blue-eyed persons it possesses no coloured substance at all in front; in brown-eyed and black-eyed people, it contains coloured granules in front that obscure the blue granules in back. Why is that? Well, you see, these tiny little sacks are constantly being filled with blood and then emptied. The blood penetrates the tiny granules in minute amounts. In a blue-eyed person, they are constantly being filled with and emptied of a little blood. The same thing happens with brown- and black-eyed persons. The blood enters, deposits blue or black coloured substance, then leaves again and takes the coloured substance with it. This is a continual process.

Now, some people have a strong force in their blood that drives the substances from food all the way into the eyes. This gives them brown or black granules. Those with black granules are people whose organisms can drive the blood most strongly into the eyes; the substances from nourishment easily reach into the eyes. This is less the case with brown-eyed people. Their eyes are not so well-nourished, and a blue-eyed person's organism does not drive the nourishing substances far enough into the eyes to fill the front part of the iris with them. It remains transparent and all we can see is the back part. Thus, a person is blue-eyed because of the way all the substances circulate through his organism. If you observe such a blue-eyed person, you can say that he has less driving force in his circulation than one who is black-eyed.

Consider the Scandinavians. Much of the nourishment must be utilized in fighting off the surrounding cold. A Nordic man does not have enough energy left to drive the nourishment all the way into the eyes; his energy is needed to ward off the cold. Hence, he is blue-eyed. A man who is born in a warm, tropical climate has in his blood the driving force to push the nourishing substances into his eyes. In the temperate zones it is an individual matter whether a man possesses more or less inner energy.

This also affects the colour of hair. A person with strong forces drives food substances all the way into his hair, making it brown or black. A person with less driving force does not push these substances all the way into the hair, and thus it remains light. So we see that blue eyes and blond hair are related. The one who drives the food substances forcefully through his body gets dark hair and eyes; the one who does it less vigorously gets light hair and eyes. This can be understood from what I have told you.

When you take into consideration the most important aspects, you can find meaning for everything. The earth on which we live was young when it brought forth those giant megatheria and ichthyosauria that I have described for you. The earth was once young. Now it is past its prime; it is growing older and some day will perish from old age, though not in the way described by the materialists. We are already faced with some of the signs of the earth's old age. Therefore, the entire human race has been weakened in regard to the driving force that moves the food substances through the body. So what part of the population is going to be the first to disappear from the earth? Dark people can last longer, for they possess greater driving force; blonds have less and become extinct sooner. The earth is indeed already into its old age. The gentleman who asked the question pointed out that there are fewer blonds around than in his youth. Because the earth has less vitality, only the black and brown peoples attain sufficient driving force; blonds and blue-eyed people are already marked for extinction because they can no longer drive nourishment with the necessary force through their bodies.

We can say that fair people were actually always weaker physically and that they were only mentally stronger. In former times many people were blond, but they were strong in spirit and knew much of what many today can no longer know. This is why I called your attention to how much people knew in olden days. Look at ancient India, five thousand years before the birth of Christ. The original inhabitants were black; they were quite dark. Then people with blond hair migrated from the north to the south. The Brahmans descended from those who were especially revered, the fair Brahmans. In time, however, blondness will disappear because the human race is becoming weaker. In the end, only brown- and black-haired people will be able to survive if nothing is done to keep them from being bound to matter. The stronger the body's forces, the weaker the soul's. When fair people become extinct, the human race will face the danger of becoming dense if a spiritual science like anthroposophy is not accepted. Anthroposophy does not have to take the body into consideration but can bring forth intelligence from spiritual investigation itself.

You see, when we really study science and history, we must conclude that if people become increasingly strong, they will also become increasingly stupid. If the blonds and blue-eyed people die out, the human race will become increasingly dense if men do not arrive at a form of intelligence that is independent of blondness. Blond hair actually bestows intelligence. In the case of fair people, less nourishment is driven into the eyes and hair; it remains instead in the brain and endows it with intelligence. Brown- and dark-haired people drive the substances into their eyes and hair that the fair people retain in their brains. They then become materialistic and observe only what can immediately be seen. Spiritual science must compensate for this; we must have a spiritual science to the same degree that humanity loses its intelligence along with its fair people. We have not built the Goetheanum as a joke, for no reason at all; we have built it because we anticipated what would happen to the human race if there were not spiritual compensation for what will disappear from the natural world. The matter is so serious that we can say that mankind on this earth must once again attain something fruitful, though in a different form from what was produced in ancient times. It is indeed true that the more the fair individuals die out the more will the instinctive wisdom of humans vanish. Human beings are becoming denser, and they can regain a new wisdom only if they do not have to depend on their bodies, but possess, instead, a true spiritual science. It is really so, and if people today want to laugh about it, let them. But then they have always laughed about things that have brought about some great change.

In the age when those giant beasts existed that I have described—the ichthyosauria, plesiosauria and megatheria—cows certainly did not yet exist, cows from whom milk is taken for human consumption. Of course, neither did human beings exist then who would have required such milk. But just yesterday I read a statement by somebody who is really afraid of progress. He thinks people who express ideas today that should be formulated only after many centuries have passed ought to be persecuted, because the time is not ripe for their utterances. Gentlemen, it seems to me that if this had been the case in the period when cows were supposed to come into existence, no creature would have had the courage to become a cow! It is like saying, “What is taught today as anthroposophy should emerge only after many centuries.” Well, then it wouldn't appear at all, just as no cows would have come into being. In effect, it is like saying, “I would rather remain an old primeval hog than transform myself into a cow!”

The situation on earth is such that we must have the courage to change and to ascend from those periods when mankind knew things instinctively, to one in which everything is known consciously. This is why I present everything to you here in such a way that you can comprehend fully what is really going on and know in what direction the wind is blowing. When you read a book nowadays, or when you hear about what goes on in the great wide world, you cannot actually get to the bottom of what makes everything tick. But people don't know that. You can understand a phenomenon like the gradual extinction of blonds if you comprehend how nourishing substances penetrate into both the eyes and hair, the colouring of which is closely related.

If you go to Milan, you will find that the head of the lion there is depicted in such a way that its mane, that is, the largest accumulation of hair the lion possesses, looks like rays of light. This rendering is based on an ancient wisdom in which it was known that both the eyes and hair are related to light and its rays.

Hair is indeed like plants, which are placed in the ground and whose growth is subject to light. If light is unable to draw the nourishing substances all the way into the hair, it remains blond. If a person is more closely tied to matter, the food substances penetrate the hair completely and counteract the light; then he gets black hair. Sages of old were still aware of this, just as were men even a few centuries ago. Thus, they did not depict the lion's mane as being curly but instead they gave it a radiating, straight form, as if the sun had placed its beams right into the lion's head. It is most interesting to observe such things.

As you recall, gentlemen, last time we talked about the eye, and we were particularly impressed with its marvellous configuration. Even in regard to its external form, the eye reproduces a whole world. When we become acquainted with the interior of the eye, the way we did the last time, we discover that there is indeed a miniature world within. That I have explained to you, and thus we have become familiar with two senses of man, sight and hearing.

Now, in connection with other questions you have recently posed, we shall see that a particularly fascinating and interesting human sense is that of smell. This sense appears to be of minor importance in man but, as you know, it is of great significance in the dog. You could say that all the intelligence of the dog is, in fact, transferred to the sense of smell. You need only consider how much the animal can accomplish by smell. A dog recognizes people by smell long after it has been with them. Anyone who observes dogs knows that they recognize and identify somebody with whom they have been acquainted, not by the sense of sight, but by that of smell. If you have heard recently how dogs can become excellent detectives and search for lawbreakers or for people in general, you will say to yourselves that here the sense of smell accomplishes rare things that naturally appear simple but are in actuality not so simple at all. You need only consider these matters to realize that they are not so simple.

“Well,” you may say casually, “the dog merely follows the scent.” Yes, gentlemen, that is true, the dog does indeed follow the scent. But think about it. Police dogs are used to follow, say, first the track of thief X and then the track of thief Y, one right after the other. The two scents are completely different from each other; if they were alike the dog could naturally never be able to follow them. Imagine now that you had to point out the difference between these tracks that the dogs distinguish by smell; you would discover no significant difference. The dog, however, does detect differences. The point is not that the dog follows the tracks back and forth in general but that it is capable of distinguishing between the various traces of scent. That, indeed, indicates intelligence.

There is yet another extremely important consideration. Civilized men use their sense of smell for foods and other external things, but it doesn't inform them of much else. In contrast, primitive tribes in Africa can smell out their enemies at far range, just as a dog can detect a scent. They are warned of their foes by smell. Thus, the intelligence that is found in such great measure in the dog is also found to a certain degree among primitive people. The member of a primitive tribe in Africa can tell long before he has seen his adversary that he is approaching; he distinguishes him from other people with his nose. Imagine how delicate one's sense of discernment in the nose must be if by that one can know that an enemy is nearby. Also, Africans know how to utter a certain warning sound that Europeans cannot make at all. It is a clicking sound, somewhat like the cracking of a whip.

It can be said that the more civilized a man becomes, the more diminished is the importance of his sense of smell. We can use this sense to ascertain whether we are dealing with a less developed species like the canine family—and they are a lower species—or one more developed. If we were to follow up on this, we would probably make some priceless discoveries about hogs, which, of course, have an exceptionally strong sense of smell.

There is something else in regard to this that will interest you. The elephant is reputed to be one of the most intelligent animals, and it certainly is; the elephant is a highly intelligent animal. Well, what feature is particularly well-developed in the elephant? Look at the area above the teeth in the dog and the pig, the area that in man forms itself into the nose. When you picture an especially strong and pronounced development of this part, you arrive at the elephant's trunk. The elephant possesses what is nose in us to a particularly pronounced degree, and therefore it is the most intelligent animal. The extreme intelligence of the elephant does not depend on the size of the brain but on its extension straight into the nose.

All these facts challenge us to ask how matters stand in respect to the human nose, an organ that civilized man today does not really know too much about. Of course, he is familiar with its anatomy and structure, but basically, he does not know much more than the fact that it sits in the middle of his face. Yet, the nose, with its continuation into the brain, is actually a most interesting organ. If you will recall my descriptions of the ear and the eye, you will say to yourselves that they are complicated. The nose, however, is not so complicated, but it is quite ingenious.

Seen from the front, the nose has a wall in the middle, the septum. This can be felt when you hold your nose. The septum divides the nose into a left and a right side, and to the left and the right are the actual parts of this organ. From the front it looks like this (sketching). The cribriform plate is located in the skull bone up where the nose sits between the eyes. It is like a little sieve. In other words, it is a bone with many holes. It is intricate but in my drawing I shall simplify it. On the exterior, the nose has skin like the skin on the rest of the body; inside, it is completely lined and filled out with a mucous membrane. This is everywhere in the nose, a fact that you can readily confirm. This membrane secretes mucus; if you did not have it, you would not have to blow your nose. So, inside the nose is a membrane that secretes mucus, but the matter is more complicated. You will have noticed that children who cry secrete a lot of nasal mucus. A canal in the upper part of the nose leads to the tear glands, which are located on both sides in the interior. There the secretion, the tears, enters the nose and mixes with the nasal mucus. Thus, the nose has a kind of “fluidic connection” with the eyes. The secretion of the eyes flows into the mucous membrane and combines with the secretion of the nose. This connection shows us again that no organ in the body is isolated. The eyes are not only for seeing; they can also cry, and what they then discharge mixes with what is primarily secreted in the membrane of the nose.

The olfactory nerve, the actual nerve used for smelling, passes through the cribriform plate, which is located at the roof of the nose. This nerve has two fibres that pass from the brain through the sieve-like bone and spread out within the nose. The mucous membrane, which we can touch with our finger, is interlaced by the olfactory nerve, which reaches into the brain. We can easily discern that because the nose is constructed quite simply.

Now we come to something that can reveal much to one who thinks sensibly. You see, a thorough examination will show that no one has eyes of equally strong vision, and when we examine the two hands we readily discover that they are not of equal strength. The organs of the human being are never completely equal in strength on both the left and right side. So it is also with the nose. Generally, we simply do not smell as well with the left nostril as with the right, but it is the same here as it is with the hand; some individuals are better at smelling with the left nostril than with the right, just as some people are left-handed. As you know, some people in the world are screwed together the wrong way. I am not referring to those people whose heads are screwed on wrong [(A play on words. In German, a “Querkopf' is a person who is odd. Rudolf Steiner then uses the term “Querherz” to indicate the anatomical oddity of the heart.)] but to those whose hearts are screwed on the wrong way. In the average person, the heart is located slightly off-centre to the left, as are the rest of the internal organs. Now, in a person whose heart is screwed on the wrong way, as it were, whose heart is off-centre a bit to the right, the stomach is also pushed over slightly to the right. Such a person is all “screwed up,” but this phenomenon is indeed less noticeable than when one is screwed up in the head. The fact becomes apparent when a person has fallen ill or has been dissected. Autopsies first led to the discovery that there are such odd people whose hearts and stomachs are shifted to the right. Of course, since not everyone who is queer in the head is dissected after death, one often doesn't even know that there are many more such “odd people” than is normally assumed whose hearts are off-centre to the right.

A truly effective pedagogy must take this into consideration. When dealing with a child who does not have its heart in the right place, speaking strictly anatomically, this must be taken into account; otherwise, it can have awkward consequences for the youngster. Because man is not just a physical apparatus, he does not necessarily have to be educated in such a way that abnormalities like this have to become an obstacle. Taking such aspects into consideration is what truly makes pedagogy an art.

A Professor Benedikt has examined the brains of many criminals. In Austria this was frowned upon because the people there are Catholics and they see to it that such things are not done. Benedikt was a professor in Vienna. He got in touch with officials in Hungary, where at one time there were more Calvinists, and he was given permission to transport the heads of executed criminals to Vienna. Several things then happened to him. There was a really ruthless killer who had I don't know how many murders on his conscience and who also had religious faith. He was a devout Catholic. When a rumour broke out that the brains of criminals were being sent to Professor Benedikt in Vienna, this criminal who was a cold-blooded murderer protested. He did not want his head sent to the professor because he didn't know where he would look for it to piece it together with the rest of his body when the dead arise on Judgment Day. Even though he was a hardened criminal, he did believe in Judgment Day.

So what did Professor Benedikt find in the brains of criminals? In the back of our heads we have a “little brain,” the cerebellum, which I shall speak about later on. It is covered by a lobe of the “large brain,” the cerebrum. It looks like a small tree (drawing). On top it is covered by the cerebrum and the occipital lobe. Now, Professor Benedikt discovered that in people who have never committed murder or a theft—and there are such people—the occipital lobe extends down to here (drawing), whereas in those who had been murderers or other criminals the lobe did not extend so far; it did not cover the cerebellum below.

A malformation like that is naturally congenital; a person is born with it. And, gentlemen, there are a great many people born with an occipital lobe that is too small to properly cover the cerebellum! It can be made up for by education, however. Nobody has to become a killer because he has a shorter occipital lobe; he becomes a criminal only if he is not properly educated. From this you can see that if the body is not correctly developed one can compensate for it with the forces of the soul. Therefore, it is nonsense to say that a person cannot help becoming a criminal—which is what the otherwise brilliant professor stated—because as an embryo he was incorrectly positioned in the mother's womb and thus did not properly develop the occipital lobe. He might be quite well-educated by accepted standards, but he is not properly educated in regard to such an abnormality. Of course, he cannot help the inadequacies of education, but society can help it; society must see to it that the matter is handled correctly in education. I mention this so you may realize the great significance of the whole organization of man.

Let us return again to the subject of the dog. We must admit that in the dog the nose is especially well-developed. Now, gentlemen, what do we actually smell? What does a dog really smell? If you take a bit of substance like this piece of chalk, you will not smell it. You will be able to smell it only if the substance is set on fire, and the ingredients evaporate to be received into the nose as vapor. You cannot even smell liquid substances unless they first evaporate. We smell only what has first evaporated. Also, there must be air around us with which the vapours from substances can mix. Only when substances have become vaporous can we smell them; we cannot smell anything else. Of course, we do smell an apple or a lily, but it is nonsense to say that we smell the solid lily. We smell the fragrance arising from the lily. When the vapor-like scent of the lily wafts in our direction, then the nerve in the nose is able to experience it.

What a primitive tribesman smells of his enemy are his evaporations. You can conclude from this that a man's presence makes itself felt much farther than his hands can reach. If we were primitive people and one of us were down in Arlesheim, he would know if an adversary of his were up here among us. This would mean that his foe would have to make his being felt all the way down to Arlesheim! (Arlesheim is about 154 miles from Dornach.) Indeed, all of you extend to Arlesheim by virtue of what you evaporate. On account of a man's perspirations, something of himself extends a good distance around himself, and through that he is present to a greater degree than through what one can see externally.

Now, the dog does something interesting that man cannot do. All of you are quite familiar with it. If somewhere you meet a dog you know well and that is equally well-acquainted with you, the animal will wag its tail because it is glad to see you. Yes, gentlemen, why does it wag its tail? Because it experiences joy? A man cannot wag his tail when he is happy, because he does not have one anymore. In this regard man has become stunted, insofar as he has no way to immediately lend expression to his joy. The dog, however, smells the person and wags its tail. On account of the scent, the dog's whole body reaches a state of excitement that is expressed by the tail muscles receiving the experience of gladness. In this respect man has reached the stage where he lacks such an organ with which he could express his joy in this way.

We see that while man is more cultivated than dogs, he lacks the ability to drive the sensation of smell down his spinal cord. The dog can do this; the scent enters its nose and is transmitted down the spinal cord, and then the dog wags its tail. What enters its nose as scent travels down the spinal cord. The end of the spine is the tail, and so it wags it. Man cannot do that and I shall tell you why he cannot. Man also possesses a spinal cord, but he cannot transmit a scent through it. Now, I shall draw the whole head of the human being in profile (diagram). The spinal cord continues down on the left. In the case of the dog it becomes the tail, which the animal can wag. Man, however, turns the force of his spinal cord in the other direction. Indeed, he has the capacity to change many things around, something that the animals cannot do. Thus, animals walk on all fours, or if they do not, as in the case of some monkeys, it is all the worse for them. They are actually organized to walk on all fours. But the human being raises himself up. At first man too walks on all fours, but then he stands erect. The force through which he accomplishes this and that passes through the spinal cord is the same force that pushes the whole brain forward. It is actually quite interesting to see a dog wag its tail. If a human being compared himself to the dog, he can exclaim, “Isn't that something; it can wag its tail, and I cannot!”

The whole force that is contained in this wagging tail, however, has been dammed back by man, and it has pushed the brain forward. In the dog it grows backward, not forward. The force that the dog possesses in its tail we turn around and lead into the brain. You can picture to yourselves how this really works by realizing that at the end of the spine, where we have the so-called tail bone, is the coccyx, which consists of several atrophied vertebrae. In the dog they are well-formed and developed; in us they are a fused and completely stunted protrusion that we can no longer wag. It ends here and is covered by skin. Now, we are able to turn this whole “wagging ability” around, and if in fact the top of the skull were not up here (b), upon smelling a pleasant odour we could wag with our brain, as it were. If our skull bones did not hold it together, we would actually wag with our brain toward the front when we are glad to see somebody.

You see, this is what marks the human organization; it reverses that function found in the animals. This tail wagging ability is still developed but it is reversed. In reality, we too wag something, and some people have a sensitivity for perceiving it. Isn't it true that court officials fawn and cringe in the royal presence? Of course, theirs is not a wagging like that of a dog, but some people still get the feeling that they are really wagging their tails. This is because their wagging is on the soul level and indeed looks like tail wagging. If one has acquired clairvoyance—something that is easily misunderstood but that merely consists of being able to see some things better than others—then, gentlemen, one does not just have the feeling that a courtier is wagging his tail in front of a personage of high rank; one actually sees it. He does not wag something in the back, but he does indeed wag something in the front. Of course, the solid substances within the brain are held together by the skull bones, but what is developed there in the form of delicate substantiality, as warmth, wags when a courtier is standing before royalty. It fluctuates. Now it is warm, now a little cooler, warmer, cooler. Someone with a delicate sensitivity for this fluctuating warmth, who is standing in the presence of courtiers surrounding the Lords, sees something that looks like a fool's cap wagging back and forth in front. It is correct to say that the etheric body, the more delicate organization of man, is wagging in front. It is absolutely true that the etheric body wags.

In the dog or the elephant all this is utilized to form the spinal cord. What remains stunted in both these animals is reversed and pushed forward in man. How is that? In the brain two things meet: The “wagging organ,” which has been pushed forward and is present only in man, and the olfactory nerve, which is also present in man. In the case of the dog, the olfactory nerve enlarges considerably because nothing counteracts it; what would restrain it is wagging in the back. The human being turns this around. The whole “wagging force” comes forward to the nose, and thus the olfactory nerve is made as small as possible; as it penetrates into the brain it is compressed from all sides by what comes to meet it there. You see, man has within the head an organ that, on the one hand, forces back his faculty of smell but, on the other, makes him into a human being. This organ results from the forces that are pushed up and forward.

In the case of the dog and the elephant, much of the olfactory nerve is located in the forward part of the brain; a large olfactory nerve is present there. In man, this nerve is somewhat stunted. The nerves that were pushed upward from below spread out instead. As a result, in this spot where in the dog sensations of smell spread out much further, in the human being the noblest part of the brain is located. There, located in the forward part of the brain, is the sense for compassion, the sense for understanding other human beings, and that is something noble. What the dog expends in its tail wagging, man transforms into something noble. There, in the forward part of the brain, just at the spot where the lowly nose would otherwise transmit its olfactory nerve, man possesses an extraordinarily noble organ.

I have mentioned that we do not smell equally well with the left and the right nostrils. Now, try to recall someone who is in the habit of making pronounced gestures. What does he do when he is pondering something? I am sure you have seen it. He reaches up with his finger or his hand and touches his nose; his index finger comes to rest directly over the septum, the inner wall dividing the nasal passages. For right here, behind the nose and within the brain, the capacity for discrimination has its physical expression.

The septum of the dog enables it not only to follow a lead exactingly but also to distinguish carefully with the left and the right nostrils how the scents appear to either one or the other. The dog always has in its right nostril the scent of what it is pursuing at the moment, while in the left it has the scents of everything it has already pursued. The dog therefore becomes increasingly skilful in pursuit, just as we men become more and more intelligent when we learn more and commit facts to our memory. The dog has a particularly good memory for scents, and that is why he becomes such a keen tracker.

A trace of that still exists in human life. Man's sense of smell has become dulled, but Mozart, for example, was sometimes inspired with his best melodies when he smelled a flower in a garden. When he pondered the reason for this, he realized that it happened because he had already smelled this flower somewhere else and that he had especially liked it. Mozart would never have gone so far as to say, “Well, I was once in this beautiful garden in such and such a place, and there was this flower with a wonderful fragrance that pleased me immensely; now, here is the fragrance again, and it makes me almost want to, well—wag my tail.” Mozart would not have said that, but a beautiful melody entered his mind when he smelled this flower the second time. You can tell from this how closely linked are the senses of smell and memory.

This is caused not by what we human beings absorb as scents but rather by what we push forward in the brain and against it. Our power of discrimination is developed there. If a person can think especially logically, if he has the proper thought relationships, then we can say that he has pushed his brain forward against his olfactory nerve, that he has actually adjusted the brain to what otherwise would have also been the olfactory nerve. We can say, too, that the more intelligent a man is, the more he has overcome the dog nature in himself. If a person were born with a dog-like capability to smell especially well, and he was educated to learn to distinguish things other than smells, he would become an unusually clever person because he would be able to discriminate among these other things by virtue of what he had pushed up against the olfactory nerve.

Cleverness, the power of discrimination, is basically the result of man's overcoming his sense of smell. The elephant and the dog have their intelligence in their noses; in other words, it is quite outside themselves. Man has this cleverness inside himself, and that is what distinguishes him. Hence it is not enough just to check and see whether the human being possesses the same organs as the animals. Certainly, both dog and man have a nose, but what matters is how each nose is organized. You can see from this that something is at work in man that is not active in the dog, and if you perceive this you gradually work yourself up from the physical level to the soul level. In the dog the nose and the bushy end of the spine, which is only covered by skin permeated with bony matter, have no inclination to grow toward each other. This tendency originates only from the soul, which the dog does not have in the way a man does. So, then, I have described the nose and everything that belongs to it in such a way that you see its continuation into the brain and find that man's intelligence is connected with this organ.

There is another sense that is quite similar to the sense of smell but in other respects totally different: the sense of taste. It is so closely related that the people in the region where I was born never say “smell”; the word is not used there at all. They say instead, “It tastes good,” or “It tastes bad,” when they smell something. Where I was born they do not talk of smelling but only of tasting. (Someone in the audience calls out, “Here, too, in Switzerland!”) Yes, also here in Switzerland you don't talk of smelling; smelling and tasting appear so closely related to people that they don't distinguish between the two.

If we now investigate the sense of taste, we will find that here there is something strange. Again, it is somewhat like it was with the sense of smell. So, if you take the cavity of the mouth, here in the back is the so-called soft palate, in the front is the hard palate, and there are the teeth with the gums. If you examine all this you will find something strange. Just as a nerve runs down into the nose, so here, too, nerves run from the brain down into the mouth. But these nerves do not penetrate into the gums, nor do they extend into the hard palate in front. They reach only into the soft palate in the back, and they go only into the back part of the tongue, not its front part. So if you see how the nerves are distributed that lead to the sense of taste, you will find only a few in front, practically none. The tip of the tongue is not really an organ of taste but rather one of touch. Only the back part of the tongue and the soft palate can taste. The mouth is soft in the back and hard in the front; only the soft parts are capable of tasting. The gums also have no sensation of taste.

The peculiar thing is that these nerves that convey the sense of taste in man are also connected primarily with everything that makes up the intestinal organization. It is indeed true that first and foremost a food must taste good, although its chemical composition is also important. In his taste man has a regulator for the intake of his food. We should study much more carefully what a small child likes or does not like rather than examine the chemical ingredients of its food. If the child always rejects a food, we shall find that something is amiss with its lower abdominal organs, and then one must intervene there.

I have already sketched the “tail wagging ability” that is reversed in man and that in the dog extends all the way into the back. If we now move forward from the tail, we reach the abdomen, the intestines, and to these the taste nerves correspond. It is like this: When a dog abandons itself to smelling, it wags its tail, which signifies that it drives everything through its entire body. The effects of what it smells pass all the way through to the end, to the very tip end of the tail. The tip of the nose is the farthest in front, and the tail is the farthest behind. What is connected with smelling in the dog passes through the entire length of its body, but what it tastes does not; it remains in the abdominal area and does not go as far. We can see from this that the farther something related with the nerves is located within the organism, the less far-reaching is its effect in the body. This will teach us to understand even better than we know already that the whole form of man depends on his nerves. Man is formed after his nerves. In the case of the dog, its tail is formed after the nose. What are its intestines formed after? They are formed after the nerves of the muzzle. The nerves are situated on one end, and they bring about the form on the other end. This is something that you must take as a basis for further consideration. You will gain much from realizing that the dog owes its whole tail wagging ability to its nose, and that when it feels good in the abdominal area, this is due to the nerves of the mouth. We shall learn more about this later.

It is extraordinarily interesting how the nerves are related to form. This is why I said the other day that even a blind person benefits from his eyes; even though the eyes are useless for sight, their nerves still help shape the body. The way a person appears is caused by the nerves of his head and in part by the nerves of his eyes, as well as by many other nerves. Therefore, if we want to understand why the human being differs in form from the dog, we have to think of the nose! The nose plays an important part in the shape of a dog, but in the human being it is overcome and somewhat subdued in its functions. In the dog, the nose occupies a higher rung on the ladder; it is the head-master, so to speak. In man, the function of the nose is forced back. The eye and the ear are certainly more important for his formation than is the nose.

Gentlemen, this time let us finish answering a question raised the other day.

By virtue of his skin, man is an entire sense organ. The skin of the human being is something extraordinarily complicated and truly marvellous. When we trace it from the outside inward, we find first a transparent and horny layer called the epidermis. It is transparent only in us white Europeans; in Africans, Indonesians and Malayans, it is saturated with coloured granules and thus tinged with colour. It is called “horny” because it consists of the same substance, arranged a little differently, from which the horns of animals and our nails and hair are fashioned. Our nails actually grow out of the uppermost layer of the skin. Under this layer lies the dermis, which consists of an upper and a lower layer. So we are in fact covered and enclothed with a three-layered skin: the outer epidermis, the middle layer of the dermis and the lower part of the dermis.

The lowest layer of the dermis nourishes the whole skin; it stores the nourishing substances for the skin. The middle layer is filled with all kinds of things, but in particular it is filled with muscle fibres. Everywhere in this layer are myriad tiny onion-like things, one next to the other; we have thousands upon thousands in our skin. We can call them “onions” because the distinguishing feature of an onion is its many peels, and these little corpuscles have such “onion peels”; the onion skin is on the surface, and the other, thinner part is on the inside. They were discovered by the Italian Pacini and are therefore called “Pacinian corpuscles.”

Around these microscopic corpuscles are from twenty to sixty such peels, so you can imagine how small they are.

Man is constituted in such a way that he has these microscopic little bulbs over the whole surface of his body. The largest number is found—in snakes as well as in men—on the tip of the tongue. Yes, it is almost comical, but most are found on the tip of the tongue! There are many on the tips of the fingers, on the palms of the hands and on other parts of the body, but most are on the tip of the tongue. For example, there are seven times more such little nerve bulbs on the tip of the tongue than there are on the finger tips.

A nerve fibre originates from each of these corpuscles and finds its way into the brain via the spinal marrow. All these nerve fibres radiate from the brain, and everywhere in the body they form such nerve bulbs on its surface. So these nerve fibres in the brain go everywhere and eventually form the onions within the skin or dermis. It is interesting to realize that just as real onions grow in the ground and form onion blossoms above, so do these onions grow in the human body. There (pointing to his sketch) are the onions and the stem within. In those nerves of the tongue the stem is rather short, but in other nerves it is sometimes quite long. The nerve fibres going from the feet into the brain through the spinal marrow are extremely long. Everything that we have as onions in our skin actually has blossoms within our skull. You may imagine, then, that in regard to his skin man is a kind of soil; it is strangely formed, but it still is a kind of soil. On the surface is the epidermis, in which various crystal substances are deposited. Below are the solid masses of the body, and above is the layer of “humus.” Going from outside inward, beneath the hard, horny layer of the epidermis lies the dermis, which is the soil. From it grow all these onions that have blossoms in the brain. Their stems pass up into the brain and have blossoms there.

Well, gentlemen, in us older fellows things are such that only during sleep can we properly trace this network, but in a child it is still much in evidence. The child has a lively nerve bulb activity in the nerves as long as its intellect is unawakened; that is, throughout its first year, and just as the sun shines over the blossoms of the onions, so shines the light into the child that as yet does not translate with the intellect what it receives with its eyesight. This is indeed like the sun shedding its rays inside the head and opening up all the onion blossoms. In the nerves of the skin we carry a whole plant kingdom around within us. Later, however, when we enter grammar school this lively growing comes to an end, and then we use the forces from the nerves for thinking. We draw these forces out and use them for thinking. This is extremely interesting. Ordinarily, it is assumed that the nerves do the thinking, but the nerves do not think. We can employ the nerves for thinking only by stealing their light, so to speak. The human soul steals the light from the nerves, and it uses what it has taken away for thinking. It is really so. When we truly ponder the matter, we finally recognize at every point the independently active soul.

We have such inwardly growing onions in common with all animals. Even the lowest forms, which have slimy, primitive shapes, possess sensory nerves that end in a kind of onion on the surface. The higher we ascend toward man, the more are certain of these nerve onions transformed in a specific manner. The nerves of the taste buds, for example, are such transformed skin nerves.

Now, we possess these sensory bulbs at the tip of the tongue and that is why it is so sensitive. We taste on the back of the tongue and on the soft palate where such little onions are dispersed. Actually, they sit there in a little groove and within these grooves an onion penetrates into the nerves and pushes into the dermis as a nerve corpuscle. First, a tiny groove forms behind the tongue, and then an onion pushes itself into this groove. The root of the onion penetrates all the way to the surface of the tongue. On the base of the tongue are a tremendous number of tiny grooves, and in each little groove a “bulb” grows up from below. This accounts for our experience of taste.

We can be aware of everything with the sense of touch, or these onions located on our body's surface. Now, you know that what one feels one does not remember so well. I know with my feeling that a chair is hard because I feel its hardness with a certain number of nerve bulbs that constantly change, but my memory is not strained by this sensation. With the sense of taste it makes a little, though unconscious effort. Gourmets, however, always know beforehand what is good, not afterward when they have already tasted it, and that is why they order it.

So the nerve corpuscles pass through the spinal marrow directly into the brain and form blossoms there. Everything that we want to taste, however, must first be dissolved by the saliva in the mouth; we can taste nothing that hasn't first been transformed into fluid. But what is it that tastes? We would not be able to taste anything if we did not have fluid within us. Our solid human constitution, everything that is solid in the body, does not taste. Our inner fluid mixes with what is dissolved of the food. Thus, we can say that our own fluid mixes with the fluid from without. The solid part of the human organization does not taste anything. Our constitution is ninety percent water, and here, around the papillae of the tongue, it is in an especially fluid state. Just as water shoots out of a geyser, so do we have such a spurting forth of fluid on the tip of the tongue.

Saliva that has been spit out of the mouth is no longer part of me, but as long as that fluid is within the little gland of the tongue, it belongs to me as a human being, just as my muscles belong to me. I consist not only of solid muscles but also of water, and it is this fluid that actually does the tasting because it mixes with what comes as fluid from without. What does one do when one licks sugar? One drives saliva from within toward the taste buds. The dissolved sugar penetrates the fluid, and the “fluid man,” as it were, permeates himself with the sugar. The sugar is secreted delicately in the taste buds of the tongue and spreads out in one's own fluidity, giving him a feeling of well-being.

As human beings we can only taste, but why is this so? If we had fins and were fishes—which would be an interesting existence—every time we ate, the taste would penetrate right through our fins. But then we would have to swim in water, where we would find everything even the delicate substances well-dissolved. The fish tastes all the traces of substances that are in the water and follows the direction of its taste, which is constantly penetrating into the fins. If something pleasant flows in its direction, the fish will taste it, and its fins will immediately move toward it. We men cannot do what the fish can because we have no fins; in us they are completely lacking. But since we cannot use the sensation of taste to move around, we intensify it within. Fishes have a highly developed sense of taste, but they have no inward sense of it. We human beings have the taste within, we experience it; fishes exist in the totality of the water and experience taste together with the surrounding water. People have wondered why a fish swims far out into the ocean when it wants to lay its eggs. They swim far out, not only into the Atlantic Ocean, but also into other parts of the earth's oceans, and then the young slowly return to European waters. Why is this? Well, European fishes that swim around in our rivers are fresh-water fishes, but the eggs cannot mature in fresh water. Fishes sense by taste that a trace of salt flows toward the outlet of a river; they then swim out into the sea. If the sun shines differently on the other side of the earth, they taste that and by this sense swim halfway around the globe. Then the young taste their way back again to where the parent fishes have dwelt. So we see that fishes follow their taste in every way.

It is extremely interesting that the water that flows in the rivers and is contained in the seas is full of taste, and the fact that fishes swim around in them is really due to the water's taste. It is actually the taste of the water that makes them swim around; the taste of the water gives them their directions. Naturally, if the sun shines on a certain portion of water, everything that is in the water at that spot is thoroughly dissolved by the heat of the sun. It is changed into another taste, and that is why you see a lot of fishes swimming around there; it is the taste.

It is really a strange matter, gentlemen, because we would actually be swimming, too, if we went only by our taste. When I taste sugar the fluid man within me wants to swim toward it. The urge to swim is indeed there; we want to swim constantly according to our taste, but the solid body prevents us from doing so. From that element that continually would like to swim but cannot—we really have something like a fish within us that constantly wants to swim but is held back—we retain what our inner soul being makes out concerning taste. With taste we live completely within the etheric body, but the etheric body is held fast by the water in us, and that water in turn is held by our physical body. It is the most natural thing to say that man has an etheric body that is really not disposed to walking on the earth. It is suited only for swimming; it is in fact fish-like, but because man makes it stand erect it becomes something different. Man has within him this etheric body that is actually only in his fluid organization, and it is indeed so that he would constantly like to swim, swim in the elements of water that are contained even in the air. We would like to be always swimming there, but we transform this urge into the inner experience of taste.

You see, such aspects really lead one to comprehend the human being. You cannot find this in any modern scientific book because people examine not the living human being but only the corpse, which no longer wants to swim. Nor does it participate any longer in life. We participate in life because actually we are the sum of everything existing in the world. We are fishes, and the water vapor that is similar to us is something in which we would like to be constantly swimming about. The fact that we cannot do so results in our pouring it into us and tasting it. The fishes are really cold creatures. They could taste things marvellously well that are dissolved in the water, but they do not do so because they immediately move their fins. If the fins would disappear from the fishes, they would become higher animals and would begin to have sensations of taste.

The nerve bulbs that I told you about last time are differently transformed “onions.” They penetrate into the mucous membrane of the nose, but they do not sit within a groove from which fluid seeps out; they reach all the way to the surface. That is why these nerve bulbs can perceive only what comes close to them. This means that we have to let the fragrance of the rose come up to the nerve bulb of our nose before we can smell it. Thus, one part of the human body has the function of fashioning in a special way these nerve bulbs, which are spread out over the whole skin, in order to sense smells permeating the air.

Not only does the outer air waft toward man, but also the breath streams out from within him. The breath constantly passes through the nose, and within this breath lives the air being of man. We are water, and as I told you earlier, we are also air. We do not have the air within us just for the fun of it. Like the water within me, my breath is not solid. Just as when I reach out my hand and feel that I have stretched out something solid, so I stretch what I contain in my air organism into my nose. There I grasp the fragrance of the rose or carnation. Indeed, I am not only a solid being but continually a being of water and air as well. We are the air as long as it is within us and is alive. When we stretch our “air hands” through the nose and grasp the fragrance of a rose or carnation—bad odors, too, of course—we do not touch it with our hand but rather grasp it with the nerve bulbs, which attract the breath from within so that it can take hold of the fragrance.

This is something that is manifest also in the dog. I have told you that as soon as the nose smells, the tail wags. Just as with fishes the fins start to move about, so, too, with dogs the tail starts to move. But what does this tail that can only wag really want to do? This is most interesting. The tail can only wag, but what does it really want to do? You see, gentlemen, the dog would really like to do something quite different. If it were not a dog but a bird it would fly under the influence of smell. Just as fishes swim, a dog would fly if it were a bird. Well, of course, a dog has no wings, and so he uses the substituted organ and just wags his tail. It isn't enough for flying, but it involves the same expenditure of energy. In human beings it is the same. Because we always have delicate sensations of smell that we do not even notice, we would constantly like to fly.

Think now of the swallows that live here in summer. What arises as scents from the flowers is pleasing to them, and because it is pleasing to their organ of smell they remain here. But when autumn comes or is just approaching, the swallows, if they could communicate among themselves, would say, “Oh, it's beginning to smell bad!” The swallow has an extraordinarily delicate sense of smell. You remember that I told you that people are perceptible to savage tribes all the way to Arlesheim. Well, for swallows the odour arising in the south is perceptible when fall is approaching; it actually spreads out all the way to the north. While in the south it smells good, up north it begins to smell of decay. The swallows are attracted to the good odour and fly south.

Whole libraries have been written about the flight of birds, but the truth is that even during the great migrations in spring and autumn the birds follow the extremely delicate dispersion of odours in the whole atmosphere of the earth. The organ of smell in the swallows guides them to the south and then back again to the north. When spring arrives here in our lands, it starts to smell bad for the swallows down south. When the delicate fragrances of spring flow southward to them, they fly back north. It is really true that the whole earth is one living being and that the other beings belong to it.

In our body, things are so organized that the blood flows to the head and then away from it. On the earth, things are so arranged that the migratory birds fly to the equator and then back to their point of departure. We, too, are influenced by the air because the air we breathe drives the blood to the head. Insofar as we are beings of air, we are completely permeated with smell. For example, a person who walks across a field that has just been fertilized with manure is really going there together with his airy being. The solid man and the fluid man do not notice the manure, but the man of air does, and then there arises in him, understandably enough, the urge to fly away. When the manure's stinking odour rises from the field, he would actually like to fly off into the air. He cannot do so because he lacks the wings and thus reacts inwardly to what he cannot fly away from; it becomes an internal process of the soul. As a result, man inwardly becomes permeated with the manure odour, with the evaporations that have become gaseous and vapor-like. He becomes suffused with the bad odour and says that he loathes it. His loathing is a reaction of the soul.

In the fluid man there exists the more delicate airy form that, in a way, he takes from the fluid organization of himself. It is through this that he can taste. Likewise, something lives in this airy form that we constantly renew in us through inhaling and exhaling. Each moment it is expelled and reborn; it is born eighteen times a minute and dies eighteen times a minute. It takes years for the solid form to die, but the airy form dies during exhalation eighteen times a minute and is born during inhalation. It is a continuous process of dying and being born. What is extracted within is the astral body. As I told you the other day, it is the astral body that reverses the forces of tail-wagging that should really be down below. Because these forces are pushed up and against the sense of smell, we are able to think. The brain grows to meet the nose under the influence of the astral body, and no one can really understand the brain who does not look at the whole matter in the way I have just done. This understanding results from a correct observation of our senses.

On account of our sense of smell we would always like to be flying. The bird can fly but we cannot; at best we have these solid shoulder blades. Why can the bird fly? Gentlemen, the bird has something peculiar that enables it to fly; it has hollow bones. Air is inside them and the air that the bird absorbs through its organ of smell comes into contact with the air that it has in its bones. Indeed, the bird is primarily a being of air. Its most important aspect consists of air; the rest is merely grown on to it. The many feathers a bird may have are actually all dried up. The most significant thing, even in the ostrich, is that a bit of air is still contained in each downy feather and all this air is connected with the air outside. The ostrich walks because it is too heavy to fly but, of course, the other birds do.

We human beings have only our shoulder blades attached to our back, which are clumsy and solidly shaped. Although we would constantly like to fly with them, we cannot. Instead, we push the whole spinal marrow into the brain and begin to think. Birds do not think. We have only to observe them properly to realize that everything goes into their flight. It looks clever, but it is really the result of what is in the air. Birds do not think, but we do because we cannot fly. Our thoughts are actually the transformed forces of flying. It is interesting that in human beings the sense of taste changes into forces of feeling. When I say, “I feel well,” I would really like to swim. Since I cannot, this impulse changes into an inner feeling of well-being. When I say, “The odour of the manure repulses me,” I would really like to fly away. But I cannot, and so I have the thought, “This is disgusting; this odour is repulsive!” All our thoughts are transformed smells. Man is such an accomplished thinker because he experiences in the brain, with that part I described earlier, everything that the dog experiences in the nose.

As human beings, we owe a lot to our nose. You see, people who have no sense of smell, whose mucous membrane is stunted, also lack a certain sense of creativity. They can think only through what they have inherited from their parents. It is always good that we inherit at least something; otherwise, if all our senses were not rudimentarily developed, we could not live at all. A person born blind also has inherited the interior of what the eye possesses. He has this primarily because he is not only a compact man but also a man of fluid and air.

We have now seen how strange all this is. We perceive solid substances with our sense of touch through the nerve bulbs that penetrate the skin everywhere; we become aware of watery substances with our sense of taste; what is of air, the vaporous, is recognized by us through the nerve bulbs that penetrate into the mucous membrane of the nose. We also sense something else around us, though in a more general way; that is, heat and cold. So, as human beings we are partly solid, water, air, and warmth, since we are usually warmer than the surrounding world.

You see, science does not really know that the aspect of tasting concerns the man of water and that the element of smell pertains to the man of air. Because the nerves of taste come into the taste buds, it is the scientific opinion that these nerves actually taste. But this is nonsense. In the mouth, it is the fluid of the watery organization of man that tastes, and in the nose, it is the element of air that smells. Furthermore, the part of us that is warmth perceives heat and cold. The internal warmth in us directly perceives the external warmth, and this is the difference between the sense of warmth and all the other senses. Warmth is produced by all the organs, and as human beings we harbour a world of warmth within us. This element of warmth perceives the other world of warmth around us. When we touch something that is hot or cold, we naturally perceive it just on the spot where we have touched it. But when it is cold in winter or hot in summer, we perceive this coldness or heat in our surroundings; we become a complete sense organ.

We can see how science errs in this regard. According to scientific books, the human being is some kind of compactly shaped form. All the bones are drawn on the paper; the muscles and nerves are all there. But this is utter nonsense because it represents no more than one tenth of the human being. The rest is up to ninety percent water, and then we must account for the air and the warmth within. In fact, three more persons—of water, air and warmth—should be sketched into the figures drawn up by materialistic science. Man cannot be comprehended in any other way. Only because we are warmer than our surroundings and are also a portion of a world of warmth do we experience ourselves as being independent in the world. If we were as cold as a fish or a turtle, we would have no ego; we could not speak of ourselves as “I.” We could never think if we had not transformed the sense of smell within us, or, in other words, if we had no astral body. Likewise, we would have no ego if we did not possess a portion of warmth within us.

Now, someone might say that the higher animals have their own body temperature, too. Yes, gentlemen, but they are burdened by their warmth. The higher animals would like to become an “I” but cannot. Just as we cannot swim or fly, the higher animals would like to become an “I” but cannot do it. You can discern that in their forms; they would really like to become an “I,” and because they cannot they assume their various shapes.

So, as human beings we have four parts in us: the solid man, which is the physical, material part; the fluid man, which carries the more delicate body—the life body or etheric body—within itself; the air being, the man of air who constantly dies and is renewed in the physical realm but who contains the astral body, which remains throughout life; the portion of warmth, the ego man.

The sense of warmth is distributed delicately over the whole human being. Here science does something peculiar.

When we examine the human being from a purely materialistic standpoint, we discover these nerve bulbs that I have described to you. Now, people say to themselves, “If I touch this box, I feel it and its solidness because of the nerve bulbs. If the box were cold, I would also feel the cold through such a nerve bulb.” They constantly look for these nerve bulbs of warmth and these nerve bulbs of feeling, but they never find them. Someone will examine a piece of skin, and because some of these nerve bulbs for feeling look a little different he thinks that they belong to something else. But it is all nonsense. There are no nerve bulbs sensitive to warmth because the whole human being is perceptive to warmth. These nerve bulbs are used only for sensing solid, water and vaporous substances. Where the sense of warmth begins, we become extremely “light-sensed” beings, that is, no more than a bit of warmth that perceives exterior heat. When we are surrounded by an amount of heat that enables us properly to say “I” to ourselves, we feel well, but when we are surrounded by freezing cold that takes away from us the amount of warmth that we are, we are in danger of losing our ego. The fear in our ego makes the cold outside perceptible to us. When somebody is freezing he is actually always afraid for his ego, and with good reason, because he pushes the ego out of himself faster than he actually should.

These are the aspects that will gradually lead us from the observation of the physical to the observation of the nonphysical, the non-material. Only in this way can we begin to comprehend man. Having mentioned all this, we shall be able to continue with quite interesting observations next time.

Gentlemen, I said last time that we have several matters still to discuss. I would like to consider them today. Maybe during the Christmas holidays you could confer among yourselves and decide what should be brought up during the next lecture hour.

The human being has his senses for perceiving the world. We have examined the eye and the ear, considered the sense of touch, which is spread out over the whole organism, and have discussed the senses of taste and smell. All these senses are significant only for man's becoming acquainted with his surroundings and, as I have already explained, for enabling him to shape his body. But man does not live by virtue of the senses; he lives through the process of breathing. If you ask why he is an erect being, why his nose is in the middle of his face, for example, you have to answer that it is because of his senses. But if you look for the reason why he is alive, you have to consider his breathing, because the breath is related to all aspects of life. In one respect, human beings breathe just as the higher animals do, although many animals do breathe differently. A fish, for instance, breathes while swimming and living under water.

If we now look at human breathing we have first to consider the process of inhalation. The breathing process is initially one of inhalation. From the air around us we inhale the oxygen that is required for our existence. This then permeates our whole body, in which carbon in minute particles is deposited; or rather, in which it swims or floats. The carbon that we contain in our bodies is also found elsewhere in nature. As a matter of fact, carbon exists in a great many forms. For instance, carbon is found in coal and in every plant, which consists of carbon, mixed with water and so on, but carbon is the main component of the plant. The graphite in a pencil contains carbon, and the diamond, which is a valuable gem, is also carbon. The diamond is transparent carbon; hard coal is opaque carbon. It is rather interesting that something like coal exists in nature. It is certainly not elegant or attractive, yet is of the same substance as a valuable gem, which, depending on its size, for example, is fit for a crown. Coal and diamonds have the same substance in different forms. We, too, have in ourselves carbon of various forms.

When we breathe in oxygen it spreads out everywhere in our body and combines with the carbon. When oxygen combines with solid coal, a new gas, carbon dioxide, arises. This is a combination of oxygen and carbon, and it is this gas that we then exhale. Our life involves incorporating our body into the rest of the world by inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide.

If we inhaled only pure oxygen, however, we would have to contain an immense amount of carbon, and the carbon dioxide would have to remain in us. Yes, we would be forever expanding, finally becoming gigantic, as big as the earth itself. Then we could always be inhaling. But we do not possess that much carbon; it must be constantly renewed. We could not survive if we only inhaled. We have to exhale to acquire carbon anew, and the carbon dioxide we produce is lethal. Indeed, if oxygen is life for us, carbon dioxide is death. If this room were now filled with carbon dioxide, we would all perish. Our life alternates between the life-giving air of inhalation and the deadly air of exhalation. Life and death are constantly within us, and it is interesting to see how they initially enter into the human being.

To comprehend this you must realize that bacteria and bacilli—microscopically small living beings—exist everywhere in nature. Whenever we move, multitudes of these little bacteria fly about us in the air. Countless tiny living beings exist within the muscles of animals. As I have already mentioned, they can rapidly increase in numbers. No sooner does one appear—particularly one of the smallest kind—then the next moment there are millions. The infectious diseases are based on their capacity for tremendous multiplication. These minute beings do not actually cause the illness, but a feeling of well-being is engendered in them when something is ailing in us. Like the plant in manure, these little beings feel well in the stricken organs of our body and like to remain there. Anyone who claims that they themselves cause disease is just as clever as one who states that rain comes from croaking frogs. Frogs croak when a rain shower comes because they feel it and stay in water that is stimulated by what is active in the rain, but they certainly do not cause the rain. Likewise, bacilli do not bring about a disease like the flu; they only appear whenever the flu appears, just as frogs mysteriously emerge whenever it rains.

One must not say, however, that research with bacilli has no use. It is useful to know that man is exposed to a certain illness, just as one knows that frogs croak when it rains. One cannot pour the baby out with the bathwater and say that it is unnecessary to examine the bacilli, yet one must realize that they do not cause the illness. One never gives a proper explanation by merely stating that for cholera there are these bacilli, for flu there exist these other bacilli, and so on. That is only a lazy way out for people who do not want to examine the actual causes of illnesses.

Now, if you take these infinitesimally small living creatures away from their habitat, they cannot continue to live. For example, cholera bacilli taken out of the human intestines die. This bacillus can survive only in the intestines of men or of animals like rats. All these microscopic creatures can live only in specific environments. Why? That these tiny beings need a specific environment is an important factor. You see, if you consider the cholera bacillus at the moment when it is within the human intestines, the force of gravity does not have as strong an effect on it as when it is outside. The force of gravity immediately ruins it when it is out of its element. Man, too, was initially a tiny living being just like these countless little creatures. As an egg, an ovum, the human being also was such a microscopic living being, such a miniature living creature. With this, gentlemen, we come to an important chapter.

Compare a cholera bacillus, which can exist only in the human intestines, with the human being. All these bacilli need to live in a place where they are protected from the earth. What does this imply? It means that an effect other than that of the earth influences them. The moonlight that shines sometimes in one way, sometimes in another has its effects on the earth, and it is indeed so that the moon influences all these living creatures. It can be seen that these creatures must be protected from the earth so that they can surrender themselves to the cosmos, especially to the influence of the moon. Now, in its earliest stage the human egg also surrenders to the moon's influence. It gives itself up to the moon just before fertilization. Just as the cholera bacillus exists in the intestines, so this tiny human egg exists in the female and is initially protected there. The female organism is so constituted, however, that the human egg is protected only in the beginning. The moment it passes too far out of the body it becomes vulnerable; then the earth begins to affect it.

Women discharge such human eggs every four weeks. At first they are given up to the moon's influence for a short time and are protected. But when the female organism dispatches the human egg during the course of the monthly period, it comes under the influence of the earth and is destroyed.

The human organization is so marvellously arranged that it represents an opposite to the bacilli. Cholera bacilli, for example, remain in the intestines and are careful not to venture too far out. Left to their own devices, they remain where they can be protected from the earth's influence. The human egg also is initially protected from the earth's influence in the mother's body, but then it moves outward because of the blood circulation of the mother, and comes under the influence of the earth's gravity. With the occurrence of the monthly period, which is connected with the moon's course and influence, an ovum is destroyed; the human ovum is really destroyed. It is not an actual human egg yet, however, for it has not been protected from destruction through fertilization.

What really happens through fertilization? If left only to the earth's influence, this human egg would perish. Through fertilization it is enfolded in a delicate, etheric substance and is protected from the earth. It is thus able to mature in the mother's body. Fertilization signifies the protection of the human egg from destruction by the earth's forces. What is destroyed in the infertile egg passes over into the environment; it does not just disappear. It dissolves in the totality of the earth's environment. Eggs that cannot be utilized for the earth disseminate in its atmosphere. This is a continual process.

We can now look at something that people rarely consider. Let us draw our attention to the herrings in the ocean. They lay millions upon millions of eggs, but only a few are ever fertilized. Those that are fertilized become protected from the influence of the earth. It is a little different in man's case, because he isn't a herring—at least not always [Play on words. In German, “Hering” is a very skinny person.]—but all these herring eggs that are not fertilized and are cast off in the ocean extricate themselves from the earth's influence by evaporation. If you consider the herrings and all the other fishes, all the other animals and also human beings, you can say to yourselves, “My attention is directed to something that continually arises from the earth into cosmic space.” Gentlemen, not only does water evaporate, but also such infertile eggs are always volatilized upward from the earth. Much more happens in cosmic space than materialistic science assumes.

If someone were sitting up there on Venus, for example, the vapours that arise and condense again as rain would hold little interest for him, but what I have just described to you, rising constantly into cosmic space, would be perceived up there as a greenish-yellow light. From this we may conclude that light emerges from the life of any given cosmic body. We will also be led to the realization that the sun, too, is not the physical body materialistic science pictures it to be but is rather the bearer of even greater, mightier life. It is as I have explained earlier; something that radiates light must be fertilized, just as the sun must be fertilized in order to radiate light through life. So then we have this difference: When a human egg is not fertilized it goes out, it evaporates into cosmic space; when it is fertilized it remains for awhile on the earth.

What happens is like inhalation and exhalation. If I only exhaled, I would give my being up to cosmic space as does the infertile human egg. Consider how interesting it is that you exhale, and the air that you have exhaled contains your own carbon. It is a delicate process. Just imagine that today you have a tiny bit of carbon in your big toe. You inhale, and oxygen spreads out. The small amount of carbon that today is in your big toe combines with the oxygen, and tomorrow this little particle of carbon is somewhere out there in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. That is really what happens. During his lifetime man constantly has in himself the same substance that the human egg contains when it is fertilized. If we only exhaled and never inhaled we would always be dying; we would continually be dissolving into the atmosphere. By inhaling we guard ourselves against death. Every time we inhale we protect ourselves from death.

The child that is still maturing in the mother's womb has come into being from the fertilized human egg and is protected from disintegration. The child takes its first breath only at the moment of birth when it comes into the world. Before that it must be supplied with oxygen from the mother's body. But now with birth something quite significant happens. At birth man for the first time receives from the outer world the capability to live. After all, man cannot live without oxygen. Although in the mother's womb he exists without oxygen from the outer air, he does get it from the body of the mother.

Thus, one can say that when man emerges from his mother's body and comes into the world, he actually changes his whole life process. Something radically different happens to it. He now receives oxygen from outside, whereas before he was able to assimilate it in the body of his mother. Just ask yourselves if there is a machine anywhere in the world that can supply itself with heat first in one way and then in another? For nine or ten months man lives in the body of his mother before he appears in the external world. In the womb he is supplied with what life gives him in a completely different manner from the way he does after he has taken his first breath.

Let us examine something else connected with this. Imagine that your sleep has been somewhat disturbed. You are awakened from a fitful sleep by a quite frightening dream in which you perhaps experience that you came home to a locked house and cannot get in. Someone in the house is expecting you so you struggle to unlock the door. You may have experienced something like this. In dreams we do indeed experience such conditions of anxiety.

Now, if you examine what actually happens when the human being has such nightmares, you always discover that something is amiss with the breathing. You can even experimentally produce such nightmares. If you take a handkerchief and plug up your mouth or cover your nose, you will dream the nicest nightmares as nightmares go because you cannot inhale properly.

It is rather strange that our having such conditions of anxiety depends simply on inhalation and exhalation, in other words, on oxygen and carbon. We can deduce from this that we live in the air with our soul element. We do not live in our muscles or in our bones with our soul element but rather in the air. It is really the case that our soul moves along with the air during inhalation and exhalation. Thus, we can say that the soul element seeks out the air in which it floats after the child has taken its first breath. Earlier, it had absorbed oxygen in a completely different way.

Where does the human being get oxygen prior to birth? In the prenatal state an actual breathing process does not yet exist. There is no breathing while the human being is in the mother's womb; everything takes place through the circulation. Various vessels that are torn away at birth pass into the embryo from the mother's body, and with the blood and fluids oxygen also passes into the embryo. With birth man carries his basic life principle out of the watery element into the air. When he is born he transposes the life principle from the fluid element in which it existed before birth out into the air.

From this you can conclude that before conception the human being is first an entity that, like the bacilli, is not fit for the earth at all. Initially he is a being alien to the earth. Later on, he is shielded from the earth's forces and can develop in the mother's body, but when he is actually born and emerges from the surroundings of the maternal womb, he is exposed to the forces of the earth. Then he becomes capable of life only by becoming accustomed to an activity that enables him to live in the air. Throughout his earthly life man protects himself against the forces of the earth by living not with the earth at all but by living with the air.

Just imagine how hard it would be if you had to live with the earth! A man who steps on a scale finds that he weighs a certain amount—a thin one less, a fat one more. Now imagine that you had to grab yourself by the hair and carry your whole body all the time, constantly carry your own weight. Wouldn't that be an exhausting chore! Yet, although you do indeed carry it around with you, you do not feel this weight at all, nor are you aware of it. Why? Your breathing protects you from the heaviness of the earth. In fact, with your soul you do not live in the body at all but rather in the breathing process.

You can now easily comprehend why materialistic science does not find the soul. Materialistic science looks for the soul in the body, which is heavy. In its research it dissects a dead body that no longer breathes. Well, science cannot discover the soul there, because the soul is not to be found in such a body. Materialistic science could find the soul only if our constitution were such that in walking around everywhere we would have to carry our own bodies, sweating profusely

from the effort. Then it would make sense to seek for the soul with materialistic means. But the way things really stand, it makes no sense at all. We sweat for other reasons. When we emerge from the maternal womb, we do not live within our solid substances. As it is, we are only ten percent solid substance. Nor do we live in our fluid element, to which we bestow life. With our soul we actually live in our breathing.

Gentlemen, please follow me now in a train of thought that belongs to the most significant matters of the present time. Let us picture to ourselves a human fetus. Through birth it emerges into the outside world and becomes a full-fledged human being who now inhales air with his lungs and exhales again through his nose. It should be quite self-evident to you that when a person is born, he actually lives with his soul in the breathing process. As long as he exists in the mother's womb, he lives in a watery element. In a sense, he emerges from the water into the air when he is born. As earthly man you can live only in the air, not in water. But before birth you lived in water, and up until the third week you were even shaped like a little fish to enable you to live there. You lived in water up to the time of birth, but the earth does not allow you to live in that element. What does it signify that before birth you lived in water? It means that your life cannot derive from the earth at all, that it must originate from beyond the earth because the earth does not permit you to live. We must lift ourselves up from the earth into the air to live.

Because we have lived in water up to the moment of birth, we may conclude that our life is not bestowed by the earth. Our life of soul is not given us by the earth. It is impossible for the earth to bestow this life of the soul on you. Hence we may understand that it comes from beyond the earth. When we comprehend how life is actually contained in the breathing process, and how life already exists in the embryo but in a fluid element, we immediately realize that this life has descended from a spiritual world into the mother's ovum.

People will frequently call such statements unscientific. Nevertheless, we can study a lot of science and reach the conclusion that what the illustrious scientists do in their science is much less logical than what I have just told you. What I have now told you is absolutely logical. Unfortunately, things are such in our age that children are already drilled in school to turn a deaf ear to something like this; or if they happen to hear it, they will say at most, “He's crazy. We've learned that everything grows out of the human egg.” Well, it is just as ridiculous as learning that the human head grows from a head of cabbage. A human head can grow from a cabbage no more than the human element, the whole human activity during life, can be derived from the human egg. But children are already taught these completely nonsensical things in school.

I have already given you an example of this. Even the smallest children are told that once the earth, along with the whole planetary system, was one huge primeval nebula. Of course, the nebula does nothing when it is still, and so it is made to rotate. It starts to revolve quickly, and as it turns it becomes thinner and thinner. Eventually individual bodies split off, and a round one remains in the middle. The children are shown with a demonstration how this can be imitated. The teacher takes a piece of cardboard, sticks a needle through it, and puts a small drop of oil into a glass of water. He now turns the piece of cardboard and the oil drop, which floats on top of the water, begins to move. It starts to rotate, and tiny oil drops split off. A large drop of oil remains in the middle. This is a little planetary system with its sun. You see, children—so he says—we can do it on a small scale. So it is quite plausible that there once existed a nebula that revolved, and from this nebula celestial bodies gradually split off, leaving the large star remaining the middle.

But now, gentlemen, what is the most important factor in this experiment? Why does the drop of oil rotate in the glass of water? Because the teacher turns the piece of cardboard. Likewise, a great cosmic teacher had to sit somewhere out there in the universe to turn things around, spinning off celestial bodies! Gentlemen, when from the beginning someone teaches children such things, they become “clever” as adults. When someone wants to be logical and expresses doubt, they call him a dreamer because they know how the world began!

You see, such thoughts contain absolutely no reality. This rotating, primeval nebula thought up by Kant and Laplace has no reality at all; it is really quite foolish. To postulate such rotating nebulas is really rather stupid. The only grounds for it are the supposedly spiral nebulas observed through telescopes. Out in the wide cosmic spaces there are indeed such spiral nebulas; that is correct. But if by looking out there with a telescope and seeing these spiral nebula, a man should say, “Well, yes, our whole solar system was once such a nebula too,” then he is about as clever as one who takes a swarm of insects in the distance for a dust cloud. This can happen, but the swarm of gnats is alive while the dust cloud is lifeless. The spiral nebula out in space is alive; it has life within it. Likewise, the whole solar system had its own life and spirituality in earlier times, and this spirituality continues to work today.

When the human egg is shielded in the body of the mother by fertilization, it can unite with the human spirit. When we gradually grow old, the heaviness slowly makes itself felt by the fact that our substances are seized by the earth's gravity. Suppose a person's digestion is amiss and, as a result, the life forces do not properly pass through it. Then all kinds of tiny solid particles form in the muscles. They become filled up with these small solid bodies, which are minute uric acid stones, and then we have gout. We begin to be conscious of heaviness, of gravity.

When we are healthy and oxygen invigorates us through our breathing, such uric acid deposits are not formed, and we do not become afflicted with gout. Gout occurs only if oxygen does not pass through our body in a truly invigorating manner and does not assimilate carbon correctly. If oxygen does not pass through our organism in the right way, carbon will cause all kinds of problems; then there will be present everywhere such minute particles in our blood vessels. We feel that as an effect of the earth in moving around. In fact, we have to be shielded from the earth. We remain alive only because we are constantly protected from the earth and its influences by the breathing process. The earth is not damaging for us only because we are constantly being shielded from it. We would always be sick if we were always exposed to the earth.

You see, in the middle of the nineteenth century, when natural science had its greatest materialistic successes, people were completely stunned by its accomplishments and scientists wanted to explain everything by way of what happens on the earth. These scientists were extremely clever, and they liberated man from much that had encumbered him. Nothing is to be said against them; they can even be praised but they were utterly stupefied by scientific progress and tried to explain the whole human being in such a way as if only the earth had an influence on him. They did not realize that when the earth's influences begin to take effect on man, he first becomes nervous and then becomes ill in some way. He is well only by virtue of being constantly shielded from earthly influences.

Eventually, however, man is overcome by these earthly influences. How do they make themselves felt? The earthly influences assert themselves because man gradually loses the art of breathing. When he cannot breathe properly anymore, he returns to his condition before conception. He dissolves into the cosmic ether and returns to the world from which he came. With his last breath, man sinks back into the world from which he emerged. When we correctly understand breathing, we also comprehend birth and death. But nowhere in modern science do we find the right understanding of breathing.

In sum, man first learns to live with the world through the female ovum, then learns to exist independently on the earth for a certain length of time by virtue of the male fertilization, and finally returns to the condition where he again can live on his own outside the earth. Gradually one learns to comprehend birth and death, and only then can one begin to have the right concept of what man is regarding his soul, of what is not born and does not die but comes from without, unites itself with the ovum in the mother, and eventually returns to the spiritual world.

The situation today is such that we must comprehend the immortal soul element, which is not subject to birth and death. This applies especially to those who are active in science. This, indeed, is necessary for mankind today. For hundreds and thousands of years, men have had a faith in immortality that they cannot possibly retain today because they are told all kinds of things that actually are nothing and fall apart in the face of science. Everything that a man is asked to believe today must also be a matter of knowledge. We must learn to comprehend the spiritual out of science itself, the way we have done here in these lectures. That is the task of the Goetheanum and of anthroposophy in general: to correctly understand the spiritual out of natural science.

You see, it is difficult to get people somehow to comprehend something new. It is Christmastime now, and people could say to themselves, “Well, we must find a new way to understand how the spirit lives in the human race.” If people would stop to think how the spirit lives in mankind, and if they would try to arrive at this understanding through real knowledge, we would find everything renewed. We could even celebrate Christmas anew, because we would observe this holiday in a manner appropriate for the modern age. Instead, on one hand, people continue to observe only what is dead in science and, on the other, they perpetuate the old traditions to which they can no longer attach any meaning. I would like to know what meaning those people who exchange gifts can still see in Christmas. None at all! They do it merely from an old custom. Side by side with this, a science is taught that is everywhere filled with contradictions. Nowhere does anyone wish to consider the fact that science presents something that can lead to the realization of the spiritual.

Today, one can say that if Christianity is to have any meaning at all, one must once again embark on attaining a real knowledge of the spirit. This is the only thing possible; it is not enough just to perpetuate the old. For what does it imply to read the Bible to people on festive occasions, or even to children in school, if along with this one tells the child that there was once a primeval nebula that rotated? The head and the heart come completely to oppose one another. Then man forgets how to be a human being on the earth because he no longer even knows himself.

Anyone is a fool who thinks that as human beings on the earth we consist only of what is heavy, of the body that is put on the scale and weighed. This part we do not need at all. It is nonsense to think that we consist of these material substances that can be weighed. In reality, we do not become aware of the body at all, because we shield ourselves from it in order to stay well. The curing of illness consists in expelling the earthly influences that are affecting the sick person. All healing is actually based on removing the human being from the earth's influence. If we cannot remove man from the earth and its influences, we cannot cure him. He then lies down in bed, allows himself to be supported by the bed and gives himself up to weight. When one lies down one does not carry one's own self.

So we have the old customs on one hand and, on the other, a science that does not enlighten man as to what he really is as a human being. Nothing positive can come from all this. It is true that the World War, with all the consequences that still afflict us today, would not have occurred if human beings had known something of the inhumanity beforehand. Even now, they do not want to know. Even now, they still want to get together at congresses without any new thoughts and just repeat the same old things. Nowhere are they able to conceive new thoughts. What at first existed in mankind as confused ideas became a habit and then became our social order today. We are not going to get anywhere in the world again until from within we really feel what in fact the human being is.

This is really what those who understand the aims of anthroposophy conceive of as Christmas. Christmas should remind us that once again a science of the spirit must be born. Anthroposophy is the best spiritual being that can be born. Mankind is much in need of a Christmas festival. Otherwise, it does away with the living Christ and retains only the cross of Christ. Ordinary science is only the cross, but once again we must arrive at what is living. We must strive for that.

Well, gentlemen, that is what I wanted to mention on this particular day in addition to the other things. With this, I wish you all pleasant holidays!