The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Third Lecture

[ 1 ] I have been told that a more in-depth theoretical justification is desired for what I presented yesterday. Now, it always seems to me that the doubts and inner opposition—which, quite understandably, must assert themselves against this perspective today—are driven even more strongly, I might say, driven out from within once this spiritual justification is provided; and that, particularly with regard to medicine, I have a little hope that in this field, if the remedies prove effective in practice and it becomes evident from the remedies that there is something behind them, people will forgive us for the lack of a theoretical foundation. So in this particular field, unless it is expressly requested, I am somewhat hesitant to provide a theoretical justification. For at first glance, it must sound even more fantastical—even though it is as precise as mathematics—than what can be said about the practical application of the remedies. Nevertheless, since it is desired, I will not only provide a brief explanation at the end, as I had intended, but I will say something about this theoretical basis right at the outset today.

[ 2 ] The point is that, thanks to the admirable progress of our natural sciences, an infinite amount has been accomplished in terms of our understanding of the external physical-sensory world; yet it is precisely this extraordinarily significant understanding of the external physical-sensory world that has led us away from grasping human beings themselves in their total essence.

[ 3 ] What can be understood through the laws of nature—which are explored today in the natural world, whether through observation or experiment—does not extend, in the case of human beings, beyond an understanding of the sensory apparatus, namely, that which is incorporated into human beings as physical organs of sense, and that which constitutes the mechanical aspect of movement. Everything else progresses in such a way that, the deeper one truly penetrates into the essence of the human being, the less the external laws of nature apply. Of course, I must nevertheless be brief, so I can only hint at these things in aphoristic terms.

[ 4 ] But it is well known that, in fact, the human body consists, let’s say, of at most ten percent—or slightly more—of the physical-mineral substances we know in their solid state, and that the human body is, for the most part, let’s say, a column of liquid.

[ 5 ] Within this column of liquid, the forces at work are those that—mediated, for example, by the respiratory process but also by other processes of the human organism—are processes that we actually find in nature only in freely moving air. And then, as a fourth factor, there are the thermal processes. The laws of nature—which are believed today to provide an understanding of the whole human being—are applicable only to that which exists within the human being in the same way that we find sharply defined, mineral-physical substances out in nature. Curiously, these laws of nature reveal only a part of the sensory organization—or, since the sensory organization is primarily located in the human head, a part of the human head’s organization. For it is the human head organization that most closely resembles the physical world, the constitution of the physical world.

[ 6 ] The human nervous system originates, in part, in the head. In any case, however, this nervous system is connected in human beings to the organization of the head. Today, the prevailing belief is that the entire nervous system is connected to what we refer to as mental faculties in human beings. If you look at any psychology today—even one with a purely physiological slant—you will see that these psychological theories actually deal only with the world of thought, the world of thought in connection with the brain and the nervous system. The human world of feeling and will is, so to speak, merely tacked on, mentioned as something secondary, and it is believed that feeling and will are just as closely connected to the nervous system as the world of imagination. That is not the case.

[ 7 ] Returning once more to the threefold nature of the human being, as I characterized it yesterday, it must be said that only the actual capacity for creating mental images is connected to the human nervous system; the emotional life is connected only indirectly. In contrast, the emotional life is directly connected to the rhythmic system.

[ 8 ] And here we already have one of the points where modern science, precisely because of its admirable achievements in other fields, completely blocks its own path from the physical organization of human beings to their mental organization.

[ 9 ] In truth, the situation is such that the entire emotional world directly influences the rhythmic organization—that rhythmic organization in the broader sense, as I characterized it yesterday. And the nervous system serves only as a mediator, enabling us to form mental images and thoughts based on our emotions. Thus, emotional impulses directly influence respiration and blood circulation. It is only for what we have as mental images of our emotions that the nerves serve as organic mediators. And just as the human emotional world intervenes in the rhythmic system, so too does the will intervene directly and completely in the metabolic-locomotor system. And what we have in the nerves or through the nerves are merely the mental images of what is willed, the mental images of the willed. |

[ 10 ] Now you might say: that shouldn’t be of any further interest to medical professionals. It is a theory about human beings, and one could disregard it in the field of medicine. But that is by no means the case. It is certainly not the case when one considers the consequences for today’s medical view, which arise from the prejudice that the nervous system is directly associated with the entire life of the soul.

[ 11 ] As is well known, a distinction is made today between the so-called sensory nerves, which are said to run from the central nervous system to the senses and transmit sensory perceptions, and the so-called motor nerves, which are said to be related to the will.

[ 12 ] In truth, while there are nerves that have undergone anatomical and physiological metamorphosis, there is only one type of nerve. Every nerve is merely a physical mediator of perception. And those nerves that we today call motor nerves are, in their function, no different from the so-called sensory nerves. While the sensory nerve goes to the senses to perceive the external world, the so-called motor nerve—which is nothing other than an internal sensory nerve—goes inward and mediates the perceptions I have, for example, when I move a limb, or when I have to perform some kind of internal, unconscious movement. The nerve is merely the mediator of perception for something external or internal. There are not two types of nerves—sensory and motor nerves. As far as I’m concerned, the terminology is irrelevant; whether one calls them sensory or motor, it makes no difference—there is only one type of nerve, albeit anatomically and physiologically somewhat transformed.

[ 13 ] I am, of course, aware that obvious objections can be raised against this view. But since I have been working on developing this view of human beings for thirty-five years, I have truly examined all of these objections carefully. Every single fact that can be drawn from the functioning or non-functioning of the nervous system—let’s say, for example, in the case of tabes dorsalis—every one of these facts, when interpreted truly without prejudice, fits into the theoretical system I have just explained to you. Whereas you will see inconsistencies everywhere if you take today’s interpretation—let’s say, for example, of tabes-related diseases. You can only make sense of what has been carefully documented in the natural sciences today regarding such matters if you know that there is only one type of nerve, and that the emotional world is not directly but only indirectly connected to the nervous system; that the emotional world directly influences the respiratory and circulatory systems—indeed, the entire rhythmic system; and that the will acts directly as a metabolic force, that unconscious will within us, which underlies the entire metabolic process and which, in turn, metamorphoses into the conscious will that underlies our external, conscious movements.

[ 14 ] This was the first—I would say, for me, a shocking—finding I had actually arrived at over the course of thirty years based on the insights I had gained about human beings. I did not dare to voice it until 1917, because it is actually relatively easy to articulate any scientific finding that deviates only slightly from established conventions. On the other hand, it is truly not easy—I would say—to proceed in any way in the world that goes against the judgment that seems so well-founded: that there are two types of nerves. And only when I was able to be confident that there is no scientific fact today that would contradict this—that cannot be reconciled with this view of the uniformity of nerves—did I dare, in 1917, after having spent three and a half years developing this view, to voice it.

[ 15 ] But this view has yet another, entirely different consequence. Just consider this fact: that emotional impulses directly influence the rhythmic system, and volitional impulses directly influence the metabolic-motor system, then you have, in the volitional system and in what is further linked to the volitional system—namely, the human emotional system, which we can only grasp in a spiritual way, since we can only conceive of emotions as spiritual entities—in these you find the driving forces behind, for example, circulation. And you are dealing with something that is, once again, by no means easy to get past.

[ 16 ] Today, physiology—which underlies our entire medical way of thinking—is searching for the actual driving force behind blood circulation in the heart, and the heart is regarded as the source that sends out the impulses to propel the blood through the organism. The opposite is true. The blood is moved through the organism by the human spiritual being, which intervenes directly in metabolism through the organization of the will, directly in circulation through emotional impulses, and in respiration—that is, in the rhythmic system. This entire inner movement, this entire inner rhythmic activity, comes directly from the spiritual human being, and the heart—the activity of the heart—is not the cause of blood circulation, but rather the consequence of blood circulation, the consequence of the movement of the bodily fluids. The heart, therefore, merely expresses through its own movements how it is internally stimulated and moved by the movement that actually emanates from the spiritual human being.

[ 17 ] These are two things that must gradually be taken as the foundation of physiology, which in turn forms the basis of medicine: the view that the nerves are all one and that the entire nervous life is subordinate solely to the life of the imagination; and, on the other hand, the movement of the liquid and gaseous elements in the human being arising directly from the spiritual, so that the movement of the heart appears as a consequence of the rhythmic movement within the human being, not as its cause.

[ 18 ] I still vividly remember the wild passions I once stirred up in a railroad car on the route between Trälleborg and Stockholm when I explained this theory of the heart to a Swedish doctor. It was a terrible whirlwind of passions into which the man had been drawn. So I can quite well understand how these things fit into what we are all now accustomed to thinking. But only in this way does one open the gateway from the physical human being to the spiritual human being. For at the moment when you have two kinds of nerves, one type of nerve goes from sensory perception to the center, proceeding as a physical organization from the sense organ to the center. From the center, the nerve of the will extends. The motor nerve likewise conveys, in a material sense, what now appears as will. You do not step out of the material realm at all. By constructing two kinds of nerves that do not exist at all—there is only one kind of nerve—you have locked yourself out of the spiritual realm of the human being. And that is what the otherwise so admirable natural science—which is so magnificent for the outer human being—has brought to humanity. It has gone so far as to substitute a purely speculative theory for reality: the purely speculative theory that there are two kinds of nerves, whereas in fact the motor nerves are also sensory nerves and exist solely for the perception of inner movements. On the other hand, it reduces the heart to a kind of pump, a physical apparatus that, through a kind of automatism, brings about the rhythmic circulation in the human being. Then, by attributing the entire cause of the human being’s rhythmic movements to this physical automaton—the heart—it erases the connection between the rhythmic system, as well as between the metabolic system and the human being’s spiritual essence.

[ 19 ] What has closed the door to the spiritual human being—to the spiritual essence of the human being—is, on the one hand, the theory of the two types of nerves, and on the other hand, the theory of the heart, which does not allow the heart to be what it is, but instead makes it the physical motor for blood circulation, whereas in truth its movements are merely the expression of the blood that is set in motion by the spiritual human being.

[ 20 ] This has significant consequences. For it is only by seeing in this way how the nervous system is actually integrated into the human being that you can relate the nervous system correctly—let us say, for example—to the organization of the digestive system. The digestive system belongs to the system of the human being that I have called the metabolic-motor system, and the nervous system is polar opposites to it.

[ 21 ] Now let us consider the human being in relation to both systems. With regard to the metabolic system: external substances are taken in. The essential aspect of the digestive system is the activity that is triggered when these external substances enter the body. What the human organism is compelled to do because a foreign substance enters it—which it must transform, which it must metamorphose—what the human being must therefore do: that is what matters; this process is what matters in digestion, and this process comes to a halt at a certain stage. At the moment when this initially progressive process comes to a halt, as it were, in overcoming the forces of the external foodstuffs, the impulse toward excretion sets in. And excretion occurs here in relation to the metabolic system in such a way that it takes place directly outward. We must therefore understand the metabolic-motor system in such a way that, initially, the impulses of the human organism—which are related to the will, the will intervening directly in metabolism—drive the transformation and constitution of the substance, as it exists externally, to a certain point. Then excretion takes place—through all the well-known pathways—but the excretion occurs outward.

[ 22 ] However, that part of the digestive activity which, through the entire organic process, is directed toward the head organization— that is, into the organization where the nervous-sensory system is not exclusively, but primarily, localized—does not stop at the point in the human organism where the process ends in the metabolic-locomotor system; rather, what constitutes digestion for the head organization is driven further, in that excretion does not occur externally but takes place internally. And what is the result of this internal excretion, which is thus deposited within the human being himself? What is the result of this internal excretion? It is the nervous system. The nervous system is the system in the human organism that actually owes its substantial content to an internal excretion which, however, remains within the organism rather than being expelled outward—remaining, of course, only up to a certain point within the organism— and is shaped there by the plastic forces of the first invisible entity of the human being—the first supersensible entity of the human being, the so-called etheric or Life-Body—by the plastic forces, by the formative powers of this etheric or Life-Body.

[ 23 ] Thus, in addition to the physical body of the human being, one must distinguish this first supersensible entity, the etheric or Life-Body, which is in fact only dynamic, not material—only dynamic. These dynamic effects are present throughout the world, and in the human being in a special way.

[ 24 ] This formative body contains the formative forces that now shape those waste products into the wonderfully constructed brain—and, indeed, the wonderfully constructed nervous system as a whole.

[ 25 ] Ladies and gentlemen, I urge you to examine without prejudice everything that can be said—from a histological, embryological, or otherwise developmental and evolutionary perspective—about the description of, say, an embryonic cell and a nerve cell; and you will find that this is consistent with no other theoretical framework than the one I have just outlined.

[ 26 ] And so even as a—I would say—truly conscientious skeptic, one can still stand by what spiritual research, which I advocate, otherwise asserts. It asserts that one can attain a kind of precise clairvoyance, a precise investigation of the supersensible. How one examines this supersensible realm precisely: I have described it in my book, which has been translated into English as Initiation. It is precisely through such investigations of the supersensible that one comes to understand that which no longer follows the physical laws of nature but is, in fact, a kind of artistic activity within nature—that one traces these plastic, these plasticizing forces, which are primarily active in the human head organism and which, within this head organism, shape those material entities that are otherwise driven outward as excretory impulses.

[ 27 ] Thus, what emerges as peculiar from this perspective is that we must actually view our nervous system as a sum of degradation processes, and that the function of our nervous system is based on the fact that it consists solely of degradation processes, because it is matter that has been driven beyond a certain point of excretion and then shaped—plastically shaped—following that excretion.

[ 28 ] This is the fundamental difference between an organ that belongs to the nervous-sensory system and one that belongs to the digestive system. An organ that belongs to the nervous-sensory system is much more advanced in its evolution; it is in a descending phase of evolution. An organ belonging to the metabolic-limb system is only in an ascending phase of evolution; it develops to a certain point and, from that point onward, promotes excretion.

[ 29 ] These are the things that show us what the organs are like in their healthy state, but they are also the basic conditions for recognizing how the organs behave in their diseased state. And these are ultimately the foundations that enable us to truly understand the remedies in their relationship to the disease process. Let’s illustrate this with an example.

[ 30 ] The process that takes place in our brain—or, one might say, in the entire nervous system—this process, which develops matter up to a certain point, then breaks it down, and reshapes the breakdown products—that is, the “impoverished” products, so to speak—this process takes place in our nervous system. And this process of breakdown—not a process of construction—this process of dissimilation—not a process of assimilation—this process of breakdown underlies our mental images. Our mental images are actually based on the idea that, at every moment of our lives, with regard to our nervous system, we undergo a kind of atomistic dying that is constantly counteracted by the processes of construction. One might say that, at the moment of death, everything that is distributed throughout a person’s entire earthly life in the ongoing process of breakdown of the nervous system is compressed together.

[ 31 ] If one can study these processes—in which one is dealing, up to a certain point, with the functioning of material forces, and then with a breakdown—one asks oneself the following: By what means do we, as human beings, actually think? What makes us spiritual beings? Is it through the same forces by which we, let’s say, enter life through embryonic development? — Not at all! Our physical system must not continue to develop in a straight line in order for us to be human; rather, from a certain point onward, it must undergo a living development—a devolution must take place. And it is in devolution, not in evolution, that the foundation is laid for what our spiritual activities are.

[ 32 ] Consider the implications of such a view. It is believed that something like the nervous process is an ascending process, and as such—as an ascending process, like the process of growth or the process of nutrition—it is said to be the foundation of thought and mental images. But that is simply not possible. The foundation of a mental image is a process of breakdown. Matter must first be destroyed, and the products of that destruction must be plastically shaped so that they can serve as the foundation for the functioning of the spiritual within us—for our thoughts. We must first destroy our material foundation; we must, so to speak, first punch holes in the brain so that we can think. Thus, the ability to think does not rest on organic growth forces; rather, in order for the mind to enter our organism, it is necessary that this organism first undergo a process of breakdown, a process of destruction, a process of partial annihilation.

[ 33 ] Then, once you understand this clearly, you’ll find yourself saying: Here is a road; it has rained; the ground is soft; cars drive over it; I see the ruts. But let’s suppose now that some being came down from Mars, had never seen a car, the cars were gone, and it saw only the ruts. It then examines the ruts, digs into the earth, and says: Beneath the earth’s surface, inside the earth, there are forces that created the ruts from below. — We cannot blame the being for seeking the causes of the ruts inside the ground; it’s just that they are not to be found there, but rather in the cars that drove over them and carved the ruts into the ground.

[ 34 ] That is roughly how it is with our brain. You believe this is an organizational process carried out by our organs outwardly; whereas the furrows of our brain are impressions of our psychological and spiritual life. And we now come to the realization that, in terms of its nervous and sensory organization, we use our physical body solely as a counterforce, as a point of resistance, in order to carry out spiritual activity. Just as you can trace every track left by a car that has driven here or there—and you can deduce many things from this, for there is always a trace of something the car has done—so, of course, you can explain the entire process of thinking from the brain. This is precisely the marvelous illusion of materialism: that one should not say, “One should not explain it from the brain”; on the contrary, one can explain the entire process of thinking and the life of the imagination from the brain, but because it is embedded in spiritual life.

[ 35 ] If you follow this process—which is, in fact, a process of decay—and then move from the human being out into the great cosmic process, you will find the same processes taking place out there. Specifically, you have the process that is taking place within human beings today, but it is merely suspended—if I may put it that way—in a state of becoming, at the moment of emergence—this process, which involves the breakdown of the material process underlying the nervous system, a process that is merely held back in the status nascendi—you find it present cosmically in nature as silica forms, wherever it occurs in nature. Therefore, if you prepare a remedy in the proper manner from silicic acid—which represents the same process out there in the cosmos, except that there the process continues and then comes to a halt at a later point, whereas in the human head it is suspended in the status nascendi—if you now utilize this process found out there to create the preparation in the appropriate manner and administer it to the human being in the proper way, then you take this process away from a body that has become weakened in its etheric body to the point where it cannot carry out this process itself, through the remedy. Now, the remarkable thing about silicic acid is that when we bring it into play within the entire human organizational process—through the substances we mix with it and the processes by which we prepare it—it can actually relieve the human being of that which he cannot accomplish through his own inner organizational forces due to organic weakness.

[ 36 ] In this way, you are truly observing what is taking place within the human head. But you must view the human head in connection with the spiritual impulses. And you observe what is happening out there in the cosmos in the formation of silicic acid, and you recognize that in the silicic acid process—captured precisely in silicon, in Silicea—you have something in this process that you can integrate into the human being, thereby relieving them of what they cannot do without it. In doing so, however, you in turn stimulate a response from the human being’s innermost organization, so that it can once again, of its own accord, do what had been taken away from it for a time.

[ 37 ] Through spiritual insight, one can see what function silicic acid actually performs in the human organism when the organism cannot perform this function on its own. This is the fundamental insight that arises when one penetrates to the heart of the entire human organism and also understands its connection to the external natural world. One need only ask: What is not happening in some part of the human organism, and what should be happening?

[ 38 ] If one knows from nature where the process lies that is currently missing in that specific part of the human organism, then pathology is directly the true, real foundation of therapy. And correctly answering every question posed by pathology is also, directly, the therapeutic answer.

[ 39 ] This is what it means to be able to proceed in such a way that one says: “Well, I am preparing a remedy.” By understanding the context, I can predict how the remedy will work. If it then actually works that way, that is verification—not mere empiricism, but verification.

[ 40 ] Look everywhere to see how the empirical sciences operate. If one is able to predict what will happen based on some theoretical perspective, then one does not look to the number of cases that verify the prediction; rather, if the conditions are set up correctly and the prediction comes true, then one initially considers what one has assumed to be verified. And it is particularly important for practical purposes that such verification occurs, for practice always shows in this field whether our predictions are correct or not. What can be achieved, then, by directing human understanding from mere physical nature toward spiritual nature is that we learn to foresee the processes we observe in pathology during therapeutic treatment in the same way that we otherwise predict an external natural process in the laboratory or in the physics laboratory. If it occurs in the way we have predicted, then we have understood the matter. In this way, we extend what is truly scientific in the manner we are accustomed to doing in physics, whereas in the biological sciences—and particularly in their practical therapeutic application—we can clearly see even today that a purely empiricist method prevails. It is therefore not a matter of having less science, but of having more science in order to arrive at a truly rational—that is, transparent—understanding of the relationship between pathology and therapy.

[ 41 ] It has already gotten alarmingly late. Therefore, I will be forced to summarize a few things in a shorter, now final section, which may shed some light—even from a therapeutic perspective—on what I have said.

[ 42 ] When we consider this organization of the sensory-nervous system—which is primarily concentrated and localized in the human head—we find, based on what has been said, that it essentially underlies the life of thought and the life of imagination. But what is it that human beings call their life of thought? It is that which flows into consciousness from the actual power of thought, and that which a person actually perceives in such a way that he quite instinctively and involuntarily speaks of how, in fact, the thought is not reality. The thought that is experienced is powerless. The thought that is experienced exists, fundamentally speaking, only as an image.

[ 43 ] On the other hand, this mental life has another side to it—a fundamentally different side—and we can, I would say, easily bring to mind what that other side of this mental life is by simply considering that this phenomenon of consciousness does not yet exist in very young children. On the other hand, the other aspect of this life of thought is very much present in the very young child. This is the true dynamizing, shaping power of the life of thought. We have one aspect of the life of thought that reveals itself to ordinary consciousness precisely in mental images, thoughts, and concepts, and we have, so to speak, the backward-directed power of thought, which is identical to that formative power I mentioned earlier. So that when we look at human imagination in its connection with the entire human organism, we must actually say: what we perceive and directly experience of mental life is like a mirror image in relation to a real object. The real aspect of mental life consists of the inward-directed formative forces.

[ 44 ] And we see these inward-directed formative forces at work most strongly in the very young child, who does not yet have a conscious life of thought—indeed, they are most active in the formation of the brain. It is precisely when a person is still a child that the most intensive work is being done on the development of the organ that will then become the very foundation of the life of imagination.

[ 45 ] We dare to speak of latent heat and of heat that appears—of “appearing” heat. We know that through certain processes, bound heat can be released, emerging from the substance in which it was bound, in which it was latent. We do not yet dare, however, to speak in the same way of how, in the child, the conscious life of imagination is gradually driven out of the unconscious life of imagination, and how this unconscious life of imagination in the child works most vividly on the plasticity of the excreted material in order to bring about the nervous system through its plasticizing power. This plasticizing force then continues throughout a person’s entire life, being strongest in childhood. And through this we glimpse the first supernatural aspect in human beings.

[ 46 ] Thoughts are supersensory, but in reality it is only the images that are experienced; however, the forces that now form the actual organ of thought—the forces acting upon the nervous system—are also supersensory.

[ 47 ] But one might say that this is merely the part of the supersensible human being that is closest to physical events, to the physical process. It is something that, I would say, stands between the physical body and the soul. But if we look at the rhythmic system, which, as I have said, stands in direct connection with the human emotional life, we see something higher at work in this rhythmic system, and we see in the rhythmic system not merely, so to speak, an ethereal-plastic force at work, but an ethereal-plastic force that is imbued with spirit. And at its very core, rhythm is precisely this remarkable interplay of the processes we have seen, on the one hand, in the digestive-motor system and the metabolic-motor system—where the evolution of the material process is brought to a certain point, at which the material process seeks to be excreted, while it is internally excreted within the nervous process.

[ 48 ] Let us now imagine the entire process as, so to speak, proceeding as a metabolic process up to a certain point, at which point excretion occurs, but is immediately reversed, so that the entire process continually oscillates back and forth between a metabolic process and a degenerative nervous process; then you have the basic type of that rhythmic process which underlies all rhythmic processes. It is connected with an activity of the human being—the supersensible, spiritual human being—that arises from the animated etheric process, from the animated etheric life, so to speak.

[ 49 ] And when we look at breathing, at blood circulation, or at anything else that takes place within the sphere of rhythmic processes, we see, as it were, a higher effect—that of an animated etheric process—in our rhythmic processes, as opposed to mere etheric processes. These, in turn, can be assessed in connection with the processes in the cosmos.

[ 50 ] We see how, in places where it should not go beyond its limits, the metabolism goes beyond those limits, so that it becomes a nervous process, as it were, in the wrong place—in the wrong organ of the human being. Certainly, it seems fantastical, but it corresponds to reality. When, within the metabolic system—the actual metabolic system—the metabolic process extends beyond the point I have described, where it should lead to excretion, and, so to speak, transitions into a nervous process in the wrong place, then the disease arises that manifests in the various forms of abdominal typhus. So we must say: typhoid diseases are nervous processes occurring within the metabolic process—nervous processes that, of course, occur only as processes and cannot lead to the actual formation of a nervous system. The question now is: how do we address such a process?

[ 51 ] Once again, we look out into the cosmos, and there we find that strange substance—which is, of course, contained within the cosmos as a process, but is preserved in antimony ore. In fact, minerals and ores are, in a sense, preserved processes.

[ 52 ] This antimony is a curious mineral, a curious ore. Its crystallization always begins, as it were, by forming shapes that are spindly and wire-like. It almost looks like a plant or moss preserved in its mineralized state. But it has other properties as well. If we subject this antimony to a certain electrolytic process and apply what we obtain from it to the cathode, all it takes is the slightest contact with a metal tip to trigger a veritable small explosion.

[ 53 ] And again, if we cause this antimony to burn under certain conditions and collect the smoke on specific surfaces, we obtain the marvelous antimony mirror—a deposit of antimony ore that has undergone a specific type of combustion process, produced smoke, and deposited that smoke. Through a process to which we can subject antimony, we obtain, so to speak, a continuation of the process that we observe in antimony as it occurs in nature.

[ 54 ] When we obtain this antimony mirror—and the production of the antimony mirror* is a very important process within our pharmaceutical laboratory—when we obtain this antimony mirror, we draw closer to those forces that have a regressing effect on such processes, which extend from within the metabolic system all the way to the processes of nerve formation. The antimony-inducing forces, I would say, redirect this metabolic process—which seeks to overshoot its goal—back toward its intended target. And we achieve a reproduction of the rhythmic process by using antimony, which has been refined into antimony mirror, to drive back the organic process that has gone too far.

[ 55 ] In this way, if we use this antimonizing force correctly, we can directly destroy or halt this—I would say—nerve-forming process in the wrong place, return it to its proper place, and thereby, by grasping the actual typhoid process—by looking out into nature to see which process reverses this pathological process—obtain the corresponding therapeutic process.

[ 56 ] So that we are always able, by elucidating the pathological processes as they occur in nature, to identify either the supportive processes—as I mentioned yesterday—or the counteracting processes, and thereby, in fact, to determine the remedies in a completely rational manner.

[ 57 ] One can truly hope that this endeavor—which has already brought us success to a very large extent, but which is only now truly reaching its completion—namely, the search for a cure for cancerous tumors, will come to an end.

[ 58 ] If one must say that the metabolic process can be driven beyond its intended goal, so that it transitions into a nervous process—in a sense, carrying out the nervous process, the nerve-forming process, in the wrong place—then something else can occur as well. Not only can the tendency to form nerves arise in the wrong place within the human organism, but the tendency to trigger processes that otherwise operate only in the sense organs can also arise in the wrong place. There, metabolism is driven even further than just to the point where it seeks to form nerves; the metabolic process is driven to the point of tending to form a sensory organ in the wrong place within the human organism. And this tendency underlies carcinoma.

[ 59 ] No matter how skeptical one may still be about this today, one will see more and more—especially when, I would say, one proceeds with this guideline in histological and other aspects of carcinoma examination—that carcinoma is fundamentally based on a sensory organ attempting to form in the wrong place. Of course, this is a very rough and approximate way of putting it, but the underlying process is one that should actually only be active during the formation of the sensory organ.

[ 60 ] And now the question is: How can we reverse this process back to the point where metabolism is actually supposed to end, so that it leads not to the immediate deposition of substances but to their immediate excretion?

[ 61 ] And this is precisely where the healing process comes into play: by using the sap of the various species of Viscum—not, as some have objected, because this is based on a layman’s mental image, but on the contrary, because it is based on a genuine understanding of the actual process that takes place when mistletoe forms as a parasitic plant here or there—say, on one tree or another. For there is something extraordinarily complex underlying this process.

[ 62 ] If we examine the process that, roughly speaking, underlies wood formation—the emergence of the tree from the ordinary herbaceous plant, from the plant that is not yet internally lignified—if, in other words, we can view this process of the plant becoming a tree in the right way, then this process is, cosmically speaking, a very, very remarkable one. We are dealing here with the soil when we have an ordinary herbaceous plant that has not yet lignified, that does not become a tree. The root actually grows intimately with the soil; it is, so to speak, still part of the soil, for there is also a continuous metabolic exchange taking place with the soil. Then the herb grows with its leaves, and the flower emerges. It then transitions into the influence of the atmosphere and so on.

[ 63 ] Well, today we tend to view—though I must draw on a concept from a kind of biological geology here—the inorganic components of the earth’s soil as if they were something absolute in and of themselves. But everything we find as mineralized matter in the soil is, in fact, originally a byproduct. If we proceed as modern geology does, we will certainly gain no insight into the process of Earth formation, because we abstract from that process only the mere mineral basis. It is as if, when we present geology today as a finished system, we were to place the mere skeleton of a human being before us and claim that it can exist on its own. The human skeleton can only exist as something isolated—I would say, mineralized. A skeleton cannot come into being on its own. Nor can a skeleton be considered in isolation; it can only be viewed in connection with the whole human being.

[ 64 ] Thus, even what geology provides can only be considered in connection with the living, organic, and spiritually permeated Earth. What we see in geological formations is not something primordial, but rather something that has been set apart. In fact, the process of coal formation is merely the simplest, most elementary process of mineralization. But everything—all shale formations, all crystalline formations—is something that has been separated out, something that has been precipitated; it is, so to speak, that which has been mineralized from an originally undifferentiated organic-spiritual substance.

[ 65 ] These ideas are so difficult to defend today because—one might say—the counterarguments are so obvious. The counterarguments are almost self-evident, and they are so easy to see through. It is, in fact, so terribly easy today to calculate—approximately, of course; no one claims that it is certain—how many millions or hundreds of millions of years one would have to go back to reach this or that geological formation. This is a method that, of course, appears to be extraordinarily precise, but it is a method just like when I observe the small changes my heart undergoes over the course of a month; now I try to calculate how much that amounts to over three years. It is exactly the same thing. I can now calculate what my heart will be like in three hundred years, and I can calculate backward to a state my heart was in three hundred years ago—only I myself wasn’t there yet! The calculation is entirely correct, the conclusion is correct, the logic is flawless—only it doesn’t correspond to reality. Likewise, the calculations of geology are flawless, completely logical—but they do not correspond to reality, for millions of years ago, the Earth simply did not exist, just as when I calculate my own physical form as a human being three hundred years ago. The calculation is correct in geology, but the Earth simply did not yet exist three hundred million years ago.

[ 66 ] And so a higher perspective must come into play. It sees in everything that is mineral something that has been deposited. When plants emerge from the ground, we have the mineral aspect there. When a tree arises in place of the ordinary herbaceous plant, the formation of the tree trunk and its lignification represent a regression, an atavism to an earlier state in which the entire Earth existed. We see, therefore, just as we have other atavistic organs, the formation of the tree as an atavism to an earlier state of the Earth.

[ 67 ] If mistletoe grows on a tree, then we have something that grows in a soil that is not the immediate earth, for that is a later product—a product of detachment, a product of separation—but in the mistletoe we have something that grows in an earthly state that is an earlier earthly state. But then again, if we pursue the matter further, we must also find that in human evolution, the tendency toward the formation of the senses was the last to emerge. By tracing the process of mistletoe formation, we discover a process from a very early period of the Earth.

[ 68 ] If we introduce this process into the human organism—specifically, by injection directly into the circulatory system—we return the human being to an earlier stage of its existence on Earth, of its evolution, and in this way we work against these processes, which are the most recent ones.

[ 69 ] However, one must be very clear that these are, at first, abstract mental constructs—or, at most, the abstract constructs of clairvoyant perception. It is a form of seeing, but it is not yet a complete overview.

[ 70 ] If we take what is now at work in the mistletoe process directly and introduce it into the human being, it changes too drastically, as I said yesterday regarding other things. And so an attempt is now being made to process what is alive in the mistletoe formation process using a very complicated machine that generates both centrifugal and radial forces—and generates a centrifugal force at an immense speed. The design was not so easy. Thus, what is at work in the mistletoe process is actually transformed into an entirely different aggregate process, allowing the tendencies within the mistletoe-forming force to be utilized in a more concentrated manner than is evident today, when the mistletoe process is, after all, a decadent one.

[ 71 ] And so we will strive to continue making progress specifically with this anticancer agent, which has indeed already been developed to a certain degree of perfection and has already yielded certain results, but which will not be fully complete—and will not undergo its final verification—until this, I would say, laboratory process involving the centrifuge—which is now ready—has been brought to a complete conclusion. And in this way, too, we will seek to combat the disease of carcinomas in an ever-improving manner.

[ 72 ] In a similar way, we attempt—using our various methods—to address the processes of tuberculosis, the various organ processes, and so on; it is too late in the lecture for me to explain this in greater detail, but I would like to discuss the principles. As I have already indicated, we use these remedies in various ways: by introducing them directly into the metabolic system; by injecting them into the circulatory system, where they act differently; or by adding them to baths and the like, where they act more on the sensory processes from the outside.

[ 73 ] We also use, for example, what is known as therapeutic eurythmy, in which we guide the human organism to perform movements that are inherent within it. Anyone who looks at a human hand without prejudice will never say that this human hand can ever be regarded as something that is at rest; the form of the hand itself is, after all, merely movement frozen in time. The hand belongs to movement. Thus, fundamentally, every human limb belongs to movement. If I perform those individual movements that correspond to its formal characteristics, I can, under certain circumstances, use the movement to have a healing effect on those formal characteristics through such therapeutic eurythmy, which is connected to artistic eurythmy—an artistic mental image of which will take place here tomorrow at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. But this eurythmy is developed entirely in the physiological sense within therapeutic eurythmy. Such therapeutic eurythmy, in turn, leads to what I would describe as the external therapeutic measures practiced at the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim.

[ 74 ] And so, particularly at this Clinical-Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim—which, as I mentioned yesterday, is under the excellent direction of Dr. Wegman, who is here with us today—efforts are being made to apply what we know about the spiritual human being, alongside what natural science currently knows about the physical human being, to therapy in a rational sense.

[ 75 ] And to that end, we did indeed have to affiliate the Clinical-Pharmaceutical Laboratory with this Clinical-Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim, so that it could produce remedies in a form that truly reflects an understanding of human nature.

[ 76 ] Well, I have tried, as best I can, to point out in aphoristic form through a few brief remarks not how, as I said, one should oppose modern medicine in this way, but how this medicine can be extended—in a sense just as scientific as the way it operates in its current field—into those areas of the human organism where the spiritual intervenes. And the irregularity that arises as a form of illness through the incorrect intervention of the spiritual—through the intervention of the unconscious spiritual in a way that does not correspond to the organism—must also be taken into account in the kind of thinking that must constitute a comprehensive medical approach. Medical thinking must gradually come to see the human being not merely as a physical being, to view the processes occurring within the human organism not merely as physical processes, but to recognize purely physical processes as existing only in one part of the human being, while in the vast majority of the human organism, in the human organism, where the spiritual intervenes directly—a spiritual element that the human being possesses within themselves from the spiritual world just as they derive their material substance from the physical-material world in the form of food and other sources. Only when the whole human being is viewed in this way from a physiological perspective will it be possible to view this same whole human being from a pathological perspective as well. But this consideration of the whole human being from a pathological perspective—inseparably linked to pathology itself—yields a true therapy, since one comes to understand the relationship, the connection, between the human being and his cosmic environment; and through this, one can now find remedies from the cosmic environment—not merely through empirical trial and error, but through a proper synthesis and insight into the connection between the human being and the cosmos. This creates a form of therapy that, in turn, will not have a gulf between itself and pathology, but will form a whole with pathology.

[ 77 ] And that was what entered the anthroposophical movement as a longing shared by many physicians—a longing that was to be addressed, I would say, by this “detailed” current within this movement of Spiritual Science, which had made its mark in the field of medicine.

[ 78 ] I hope my aphoristic remarks have not become too obscure. But when one has to convey something in a concise manner, one naturally wants to present the broader principles. The specific details sometimes suffer as a result. But I hope that, in these remarks, I have at least been able to offer some specific points of inspiration.