The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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!

Question: For many years I have suffered from hayfever. Now I have heard that it must be treated early in the year. If injections are administered as early as January or February before a person begins to suffer, they are supposed to be more effective. Should I go along with this remedy?

Dr. Steiner: What you have said is correct, but there is one small catch. You see, the remedy that is in use here is meant to be applied prophylactically; that is, it is meant to work ahead of time. In fact, it should be used weeks before the symptoms of hayfever arise. The problem, however, is that patients come in only when they are already afflicted with the malady. Just today we received an interesting letter about another hayfever remedy. The inventor of this other remedy writes that his medication brings only a little relief to individual hayfever attacks. He believes that our remedy can permanently cure hayfever, especially if it is taken twice at wide intervals. Naturally, we would much prefer patients to be treated in January or February rather than in May or June. Understandably, however, people generally see a doctor only after an illness has been contracted.

Yet, our hayfever remedy works in such a way that if given to the patient even during the external appearance of the illness, which is only the final result of an inner affliction, it protects him from a renewed attack. It is particularly effective if applied again a year later. After that, the application need not always be repeated. Even though the illness affects only one organ, this remedy treats its basis in the whole bodily organization. To explain this, I would like to go into more detail concerning the causes of internal illnesses and how they arise in the first place.

Of course, it is quite simple to comprehend why one becomes indisposed if one breaks a leg or sustains a concussion due to a fall. In these cases the injury is external and the cause easily understood; the cause is externally visible. In the case of internal illnesses, however, one usually does not really consider where they come from and how they suddenly assert themselves. This pertains to another question raised earlier of why one may become infected when in contact with certain people. An external cause also seems to be present here.

Ordinary science offers a simple explanation for this. Bacilli are transmitted from an ill person who has influenza, for example, and then these are inhaled and bring about the disease in another. It is like someone injuring a man by hitting him with a mattock. In this case the injury is caused by a patient bombarding another person with a multitude of bacilli. Matters are not at all that simple, however; they are much more complicated. You will understand this when you realize that in everyday life a man constantly becomes a bit indisposed and then must cure himself. The point is that all of us are really a bit sick when thirsty or hungry, and we cure ourselves by drinking and eating. Hunger is the beginning of an illness, and if it is allowed to continue we can die from it. After all, we can die of starvation and even sooner of thirst. So you see that even in our everyday lives we bear something like the beginning of a disease. Every act of drinking or eating is in truth an act of healing.

We must make clear to ourselves now what in fact happens when we become hungry or thirsty. You see, our body is inwardly always active. Through the intake of food, the body receives nutrients. External substances are absorbed through the mouth and the intestinal passages into some part of the body. Now, you must understand that the human organization immediately rebels against these nutritional substances; it does not tolerate them in their original forms and destroys them. Food substances must actually be disintegrated. In fact, they are annihilated, and this begins in the mouth. The reason for this is that there is continuous, never-ceasing activity in our body. This activity must be observed in the same way as fingers or hands are. Ordinary science simply records how a piece of bread is eaten, dissolved in the mouth, and then distributed in the body, but we must also take into consideration that the human body is continually active. Even if nothing is put into it, if nothing goes into the body for five hours, say, still its activity does not cease. You may even be like an empty sack, but things have not quieted within. You remain in constant inward activity, and things are still bustling around. Only when this internal activity can become occupied with something is it content. That is especially the case after a meal when it can dissolve and disintegrate the food substances; then it is content.

This internal activity that we possess is quite different from man in general, for the human being can become lazy. The internal activity is never lazy, it never ceases. If I don't eat anything, it is as if I had an empty flour sack in which there is activity even if I avoid all tangible substance. This activity—for reasons that I shall tell you later on—is identified in spiritual science as the astral body. It is never lazy, and if it can stay active destroying and dissolving the food substances, it is filled with inward comfort; it then has a feeling of inner well-being. But if I take in no food substances, then the astral body is not satisfied, and this dissatisfaction is expressed as hunger. Hunger is not something at rest within us; it is an activity, a soul-spiritual activity that cannot be stilled. We can truly say that this inner activity is in love with the food substances, and if it does not receive them it is just as dissatisfied as any jilted lover. This dissatisfaction is the hunger, and it is by all means something spiritual.

So the activity that is executed internally consists of disintegrating food substances. What is useful is transmitted into the blood vessels, and the rest is eliminated through urine or feces. This is the healthy, normal and regular activity of the human being in which the astral body works properly to dissolve the food substances. It absorbs into the body what is useful and discharges what is not.

We must assume, gentlemen, that this activity of man is no ordinary activity; rather, it contains something immensely wise. Now, dissolved and transformed food substances are constantly being transmitted through blood vessels to the inner organs, and the nourishment that goes into the lungs is completely different from what goes to the spleen. The astral body is much smarter than the human being. Man can only stuff the provisions into his mouth, but the astral body can distinguish them. It is like sorting two substances, throwing one in one direction to be used there and the other in another direction. This is what the astral body accomplishes. It selects certain substances to dispatch to the lungs, spleen, larynx and other organs. A wise distribution is at work within. The astral body is immensely wise, much wiser than we. The most educated person today would not know how to send the proper substances into the lungs, larynx or spleen; he would not even know what to say about it. But internally man can do this through his astral body.

The astral body, however, can become stupid—not as stupid as the human being can become, but stupid in comparison to its own cleverness. Let us assume that it thus becomes stupid. Man is born with a certain predisposition and is inwardly endowed with certain forces. The activity that the astral body develops for food substances occurs even if somebody sits down all day, immobile like an Oriental idol. His astral body still remains active, but that is not enough. We must also do something externally, and if we have no work to do we must go for a stroll; the astral body demands that we at least walk around. This differs with each individual. One person needs more physical activity, another less.

Let us suppose now that someone has certain predispositions from birth that make him into a sedentary person. It pleases his stupid head—or we could say his stupid ego—to sit around a lot. Now, if he is predisposed to sit around, but the astral body is predisposed to walk about, then his astral body will become stupid. This will also happen if somebody overexerts himself walking. In both cases the astral body will become stupid and will no longer accomplish things correctly. It will no longer properly sort out the food substances and transmit them to the appropriate organs; it will do all this clumsily instead. The astral body becomes too disorganized to send the right substances to the heart or larynx. Substances improperly transmitted to the heart, for example, will remain somewhere else in the body. They are not put in the organ where they belong but, since they are basically useful, neither are they eliminated with the feces. Instead, they are deposited somewhere else in the body. But a man cannot tolerate having something deposited in his body that is not part of its proper activity; he cannot stand that.

So what happens with these improper deposits due to the malfunctioning astral body? What happens to us on account of that? Well, suppose we have in our body certain deposits that should have been directed to the larynx. Because someone's astral body does not function properly, “larynx refuse” is secreted everywhere in his body. The first thing that happens is that his larynx becomes weak. The organ does not receive sufficient sustenance, and thus the person suffers from a weakened larynx. But apart from that, his body contains larynx refuse, which is dispersed everywhere. As I have already told you, the human body is ninety percent water, and the refuse dissolves in this whole fluid organization. The pure, animated fluid that a man requires within him is now polluted. This is what happens so often within ourselves. Deposits meant for certain parts of the body dissolve in our fluid organization, contaminating it.

Say that the refuse of the larynx is dissolved in us and comes into contact with the stomach. It cannot cause damage there, because the stomach has what it needs and was not deprived of anything. But the bodily fluids flow everywhere in the human organism and penetrate into the area of the larynx, which is already weakened. It receives this polluted fluid, this water in which the larynx refuse is dissolved, and specifically from this the organ becomes diseased. The larynx refuse does not affect the other organs, but it does cause the larynx to become afflicted.

Let us now consider a simple phenomenon. A sensitive person finds it pleasant to listen to another person speak beautifully. But if someone crows like a rooster or grunts like a pig, he will not find this so pleasant to hear, even if he understands what is being said. It is not at all pleasant to listen to a person crowing or grunting. Listening to someone who is hoarse is a particularly uncomfortable and constricting experience. Why do we experience such sensations while listening to another? It is based on the fact that in reality we always inaudibly repeat whatever the other is saying. Listening consists not only in hearing but also in speaking faintly. We not only hear what another says but also imitate it with our speech organs. We always imitate everything that someone else does.

Now imagine that you are near a person who is sick with flu, and though you may not be listening to him and inwardly imitating his speech, you feel sorry for him. This makes you quite susceptible and sensitive to him. The flu patient's fluid organization contains many dissolved substances, which contaminate the pure, living fluid I told you about and make it instead unhealthy for him. I even describe the nature of such a contaminated fluid organization.

Imagine that you have a piece of ground where you plant various things. Not everything thrives in every kind of earth, but suppose you want to plant onions and garlic in this particular spot. Should the earth be unsuitable, the onions would be small and the garlic buds still smaller, so you should also add to this soil something that contains sulphur and phosphorus. Then you would have the healthiest onions and garlic buds, and they would smell strong, too!

Now, when a man has influenza refuse within his body, the same substances are dissolved in his fluid organization that had to be added to the ground in order to produce the finest onion and garlic plants, and before long, the sick person begins to smell like these plants. Now, I associate with this, though I may not even be aware that I am sitting in this odour of onion or garlic, because it need not be strong. The odour exuded by a person who is sick with the flu causes the patient's head to feel dull, because a certain organ in the head, the “sensorium,” is not properly supplied with the substance it needs. As a result of having flu refuse within us, an organ in the mid-section of the head is not properly supplied. This odour is always like that of onions or garlic and can be detected by one with a sensitive nose. Just as we tune in on and imitate a shrill and rasping voice, so do we join in with what an ill person evaporates. As a consequence, our own astral body, our own activity, becomes disorganized. This disorder causes a chemical basis that in turn makes us contract the flu. It is like making soil suitable for onions and garlic. At first, then, the illness has nothing to do with bacteria but simply with the relation of one person to another.

If you want to plant predominantly onions and garlic in a garden, and you add to the earth substances containing phosphorus and sulphur, you can now wait and say, “Well, I've done my duty. I want to harvest onions and garlic, and so with some kind of organic fertilizer I have added sulphur and phosphorus to the garden.” But it would be foolish to think that this is all it would take to grow the onions. You would first have to plant the bulbs! Likewise, it would be foolish to maintain that in man's interior, bacteria are already growing in the environment that is being prepared.

They first have to be introduced into it. Just as the onion bulb thrives in soil rich in phosphorus and sulphur, so do the bacilli thrive within a sulphuric environment in the body. Bacilli are not even necessary for one person to catch the flu from another. Instead, by imitating with my fluid organization what is happening in the patient's fluid organism, I myself produce a favourable environment for the bacilli; I myself acquire them. The sick person need not bombard me with them at all.

When we look at the whole matter, we must reply in quite a specific way to the question, “What is it that causes us to be stricken with a certain disease?” We become sick when something injures us, and even in the case of internal illnesses something is actually injuring us. The impure fluid, in which substances are dissolved that should have been digested, injures us; it injures us internally.

Now we can turn our attention to illnesses like hayfever. The incidence of hayfever depends much more on the time of year than on the pollen in the air. More than anything else, what makes a man susceptible to catching hayfever is the fact that his astral body is not properly excreting; it is not properly executing its activity that is directed more to the external surface. As a result, when spring approaches and everything begins to thrive in water, a person makes his whole fluid organization more sensitive and thus susceptible to this illness by dissolving certain substances in it. By dissolving various substances in this fluid organization, the fluids in a man's body always become a little diluted. The fluid organization in a man who has a tendency toward hayfever is always somewhat too large. The fluids are being pushed aside in all directions by what is dissolved in them. That is how a person becomes sensitive to everything that makes its appearance in spring, especially to pollen, those particles from plants that are now particularly irritating.

If the nose were not enclosed, hayfever could be induced by many other irritants. Pollen does enter the nose, however, and it cannot be well tolerated if one already has hayfever. Pollen does not cause hayfever but it aggravates it.

Our hayfever remedy is based on drawing the extended fluid organization in the body together again so that it becomes a bit cloudy and once again secretes what it had initially dissolved. It is really quite simple and based on nothing more than contracting the fluid organism to its normal size. It first becomes a little cloudy, and you have to watch that what is secreted from the fluidity is not later retained in the body. That is why it is beneficial for a person to perspire somewhat after having been inoculated with the remedy; it is good if he can move about and do something that induces perspiration right after the inoculation. The inoculation is always somewhat problematic when given to a person who is suffering from constipation, and the patient should first be asked if he is constipated. Otherwise, if the fluid organization is contracted, things accumulate too much and are not eliminated right away. This, of course, is not good. A person who is constipated should be given a laxative along with the inoculation.

Healing entails not only applying a medication but also adjusting life accordingly, so that the human body reacts in an appropriate manner to what has been given it. This naturally is of tremendous significance; otherwise, the person can be made even sicker. If you inoculate somebody with a remedy that is quite effective, even exceptionally good, but you do not see to it that the patient's digestion functions properly and that everything the remedy brings about is eliminated, you naturally drive him further into the illness.

With truly effective remedies it is important that the doctor know not only what medicine cures what disease but also what questions to ask the patient. The greatest medical art lies in asking the right questions and in being familiar with the patient. This is extremely important. Yet it is strange, for example, that we meet doctors who frequently have not even asked the patient his age, though this is significant. While he may use the same remedies, a doctor can treat a fifty-year old in a manner completely different from the way he treats one who is forty, for example. They should not be so schematic as to say, “This medication is right for this illness.” For instance, it makes a great difference if you want to cure someone who is constantly afflicted with diarrhoea or someone who has chronic constipation. Such remedies could be tested, and here experiments with animals would be much less objectionable than they are in other areas. Regarding constipation or diarrhoea, you can easily learn how some remedy reacts in the general physical organism that men have in common with the animals by giving the same medicine to both a dog and a cat. The dog regularly suffers from constipation, and the cat from diarrhoea. You can acquire a wonderful knowledge by observing the degree of difference in the medication's effect in the dog or the cat. Scientific knowledge really is not attained by university training in how to do this or that with certain instruments. True science results, rather, when common sense is aroused a little; then people know how they must conduct their experiments.

In sum, it is of prime importance to realize that an illness has its basis in the whole human organization. The individual organ becomes afflicted because the activity of the astral body directs substances to it that have been precipitated from within. The development of certain inner diseases like influenza, hayfever and even typhoid fever becomes comprehensible when we understand how substances improperly deposited in our bodies are dispersed in our fluid organism.

We are not only a “material man” but also a “water man,” and, as I have already explained to you, we are also an “air man,” whose form changes every moment. One moment the air is outside, and the next it is within.

Just as the solid substances that we contain within our bodies as refuse dissolve in the water, so does that water itself constantly evaporate within us. Within the muscles of your little finger, for example, are minute evaporations of water. Water constantly evaporates throughout your whole body. Furthermore, what is evaporating in the fluid organism penetrates into what you inhale as oxygen, which is also a vapor or gas. When water on the ground evaporates, it rises up into the atmosphere, and when water constantly evaporates in delicate processes within the fluid man, it penetrates into the air that we inhale. We cannot tolerate solid substances being dispersed in the fluids, and neither can we tolerate fluids evaporating into the air organism.

Take the case of a person whose lungs have become afflicted because something has occurred like the process that I have just described. This person can become afflicted with a lung disease, which can be cured if it arose from the wrong substances being deposited in the water man. But let us assume that the lung's affliction is not pronounced enough to become apparent. After all, the human organs are sensitive. The condition does not reach the point where the lungs become so strongly afflicted that they are inflamed, but they do become a little indisposed. The person can tolerate this slight indisposition, but substances now enter into his fluid organism that really should penetrate the lungs. In this case, the fluids within the lungs have the wrong kinds of substances dissolved in them; and these substances evaporate, especially if the lungs are not completely well.

Thus, in the case of the quite obvious internal diseases, the water man receives something inappropriate from the solid substances, and in this case something inappropriate reaches the point of evaporation and mingles with the oxygen that is inhaled. The fact that water evaporates inappropriately and unites with oxygen damages the nervous system in particular, because the nerves require healthy oxygen, not oxygen that has evaporations in it from the contaminated fluid of the water man. Contaminated fluid evaporates into the lungs, and this fluid may be responsible for their slight indisposition. Something that should not evaporate does, and this is damaging to the nervous system. The person does not become radically ill, but he does become insane.

It can be said that internal physical illnesses are based on something in man that causes improper substances to be dispersed in his fluid organism. But so-called mental illnesses are in reality not mental at all, because the mind or spirit does not become ill. Mental illnesses are based on body fluids evaporating improperly into oxygen and thereby disturbing the nervous system. This can happen when some organ is so slightly impaired or indisposed that it cannot be detected externally. You see, then, that man must continually process substances correctly so that nothing inappropriate disperses in his fluids and that his fluids in turn do not improperly evaporate. But even in everyday life there is a process that causes improper evaporation of water, and this becomes noticeable when we are thirsty. We cure the thirst by drinking; we free our water, so to speak, from what is inappropriately evaporating within it and wash away what is incorrect.

So we can say that in hunger there is actually the tendency to physical illness, and in thirst there is the predisposition to mental illness. If a man does not properly nourish himself, he forms the basis for organic diseases, and if he does not quench his thirst rightly, he may bring about some form of mental illness. In some circumstances, the improper quenching of thirst is difficult to detect, especially if it occurs in infancy. At this stage one cannot clearly distinguish between assuaging thirst and hunger since both are satisfied by milk. Therefore, if through the mother's milk or that of a wet nurse something harmful comes into the organism, this can much later cause the fluid organism to evaporate incorrectly and thus lead to some mental disorder. Or let us say a person is wrongly inoculated. An ill-chosen inoculation with one or another cow lymph or diseased human lymph can afflict the organs that work upon the water, even though the water itself does not become directly diseased. As a result of an inappropriate inoculation, a person's evaporation processes may not function correctly, and later he may be disposed to some kind of mental illness.

You will have noticed, gentlemen, that nowadays a great many people become afflicted with dementia praecox, so-called “youthful insanity,” which extends, however, quite far beyond the years of youth. This illness, in which people begin mentally to deteriorate in their youth, originates in great part from the wrong kind of feeding during the earliest years of childhood. It is not enough merely to examine chemically the baby's milk; one must look into completely different aspects. Because people have ceased to pay attention to feeding in our age, this illness arises with such vehemence.

You will have realized from all this that it does not suffice simply to train doctors to know that a certain remedy is good for a certain illness. One must rather seek to make the totality of life healthier, and for that one must first discover all that is related to a healthy life. Anthroposophy can provide this understanding. It aims at being effective in the field of hygiene and seeks to comprehend correctly questions of health.

Questions are raised concerning pregnancy and the possible effects of outer events during pregnancy.

Dr. Steiner: Gentlemen, these are extremely important aspects of life. Generally, no significant influence can be exerted on the child during pregnancy except indirectly by way of the mother, since the child is connected with the mother, as I have said here already, by numerous delicate blood vessels. The unborn child receives everything it requires, including its nourishment, from its mother. Later, it acquires a completely different breathing process.

We can best consider the matters that you have brought up if we deal further with the general basis of human states of illness and health. In pregnancy, it is even more difficult than in the case of common hunger and thirst to say where the inclination toward illness begins and where it ends. Other things also enter into pregnancy that prove beyond doubt that the mother's condition of soul has an extraordinary influence on the developing child. You only have to observe what happens, for example, if the mother, especially in the early months of pregnancy, is badly frightened. As a rule, the child will be affected for its whole life. Naturally, you cannot say that a physical change occurs in the child but only that the mother suffers a fright. How can a mother's fright affect the child?

Modern science basically gives the most inadequate answers here, because it really knows nothing, or claims to know nothing, of what influences the human soul and spirit. We can best approach these difficult questions—and they are indeed complicated—if we focus on two phenomena of life that man experiences primarily in illness, that is, fever and shock. These are two opposite conditions that man undergoes, fever and shock.

What is fever? You know that man's normal body temperature is 98.6°. If it rises any higher, we say that he has a fever. The fever is visible outwardly through a person becoming hotter. What is shock? Shock is actually the opposite condition. Shock occurs when a person is incapable of developing sufficient warmth within. If you take an overdose of a poison such as henbane (Hyoscyamwus niger), for example, which is also used as a remedy, you risk the danger of going into shock. The reaction is that, through the shock, all the membranes in the abdomen of the mother, where the child must also be developing—therefore, the membranes of the intestines but also those of the organ in which the child rests during pregnancy, the so-called uterus, the womb, in other words, all the membranes through which a substance is introduced into the body—become slack. It is as if a sack were stretched too far, becoming worn out and unable to hold anything any longer. With the introduction of henbane, undigested food backs up, and the proper functioning of the abdomen, which I described recently, is disrupted. A large amount of food accumulates in a man's abdomen that he cannot assimilate.

In order to understand what is at work here, we must take a closer look at the human organism. What actually happens when the abdomen does not work properly? Although it is the abdomen that isn't working properly, you will find that something is actually wrong with the front portion of the brain. A very interesting relationship!

Consider the human being—the abdomen, the chest, the diaphragm, which is about here (Rudolf Steiner sketched on the blackboard). There we have abdomen, chest, and head. If something is out of order in the abdomen, then something is not functioning properly also in the front part of the brain. The two therefore belong together. In the human being they belong inwardly together, the forebrain and abdomen. We can also say that the heart with its arteries, as I have described them to you, is connected with the midbrain. Finally, the chest with the lungs and the breathing process is related to the back portion of the brain.

Every time something is amiss with the breathing, something is also wrong in the back part of the brain. Whenever a person has difficulty breathing and doesn't receive enough oxygen, one can observe that something is wrong with the back of the brain. When a person suffers from disorders of the heart, especially if the rhythm of the heart's activity is disrupted so that the pulse is irregular, then something is wrong in the midbrain. In a disorder of the abdomen, one always finds some irregularity in the forebrain. Everything is remarkably related in the human being.

You see, people often don't want to believe these things, because in the formation of the forehead they see the noblest aspect of the human being and the less noble in the abdomen. And if one speaks the truth about these things, such people find it unworthy of man. You will have realized from my lectures, however, that the digestive system is in turn related to the limb system in such a way that it represents a most significant aspect of the human being.

Once I knew a man who had quite an unusual forehead. A Greek forehead is different (sketching). In Greek statues we find foreheads that slope backward. This man actually had a pronounced bulge, and his forebrain was actually pushed out. I am convinced that this man, whose brain was pushed forward so much, possessed a particularly well-formed abdomen and never suffered from diarrhea or constipation, for example; he never suffered from stomach aches and the like. The man in question was, in fact, a person of unusual sensitivity, but this sensitivity depended on his always feeling inwardly comfortable. This indicates that his powerful, protruding forehead never permitted disorders of the abdomen. You can see from this that a man's forehead is related in a remarkable way to his abdomen.

If I give someone too large a dose of henbane, he goes into shock. What causes this shock? Something goes wrong with the forebrain, because everything possible collects in his abdomen. Oddly, however, when a person complains of a stomach ache, caused perhaps by mild constipation, I can give him henbane in highly diluted form, and he will become healthy. He gets a slight fever and becomes well.

Here you see a strange fact. If I give too much henbane to a perfectly healthy person, he goes into shock. He will suffer severe abdominal distress, his head will feel cold, his abdomen will swell, the intestines will slacken, and the abdominal functions will cease. What do you see from this? You see that I have introduced too much henbane into the stomach. The stomach should react with vastly increased digestive activity, because henbane is extremely difficult to digest. Being poisonous simply means that a substance is difficult to digest. The stomach therefore must become furiously active. The brain is not strong enough, the front part of the brain. These things thus are related in the human body. The brain is not strong enough to stimulate the stomach sufficiently; the brain becomes cold and the person goes into shock.

What happens now if I give a person a minute, diluted dose of henbane? In this case, the stomach has less to do, and the brain is strong enough to regulate this minor task. Through introducing a minute amount of henbane, which the brain can manage, I have stimulated the brain into working harder than before. If the brain can overcome it, it is like asking a person to do a job that he can manage; then, he does it well. If I ask him to do a job in one day that actually requires ten, he would be ruined. This is the case with the brain. It contains, as it were, the workman in charge of the abdomen. If I ask too little of the brain, the workman remains lazy; if he is stimulated through his activity, he does well; if I ask too much of the abdomen, however, he refuses to participate and the person goes into shock.

What is the cause of fever? Fever is actually the result of an over-activity of the brain, which penetrates the entire human being. Assume that a person suffers from a disorder in some organ, say the liver or the kidneys, or especially the lungs, in the way I discussed with you recently. The brain begins to rebel against it. If the lungs no longer function correctly, the back portion of the brain rebels and stimulates the front part into rebelling against this lung disease, and hence fever occurs.

This shows that man becomes warmer from his head downward and colder from below upward. This is very interesting. The human being actually is warmed downward from above. With fever we are concerned with our head. If there is an inflammation in the big toe, we produce the ensuing fever with the head. It is interesting that what lies farthest down is regulated by the foremost parts of the brain. Just as in the case of the dog, whose tail is regulated by his nose, so it is with the human being. If he struggles with a fever in his big toe, the activity that begets this fever lies entirely in the front of his brain. It is no slight to his dignity that, if man has an infection in his big toe, the fever originates entirely from the front, from a point above his nose. The human being thus always becomes warmer from above and colder from below.

This is related to why shock can be induced if excessively large doses of certain substances are administered to the human being but why a healing rise in temperature can be produced if we do not overtax the brain but stimulate its activity only with small doses. The activity of the brain, however, is stimulated all day not only by substances that we introduce into the brain; what we see and hear also stimulate it constantly. Also, when you eat, you not only fill your stomachs, but you taste your food as well. Taste is stimulated, as is the sense of smell, all of which stimulates the brain.

Consider a woman who is pregnant. The child is in the first period of the pregnancy, which entails a tremendous increase in the mother's abdominal activity. Except during pregnancy, such activity in the abdomen is never necessary; in men, it doesn't occur at all. The abdominal activity thus is increased in an unprecedented way. When abdominal activity is increased, the sensory nerves above all are stimulated, because the abdomen and the forebrain belong together.

What does it mean when a person is hungry? I have explained to you that here a certain activity that really should be continuous cannot be performed. When hungry, a person craves food, which means that at the same time he longs for the stimulation of his taste buds. He can alleviate this by eating.

When a woman is pregnant, however, and must provide in her abdomen something for the growing child, much is stimulated also in the brain, particularly in the sensory nerves, the nerves of taste and smell. Eating does not satisfy these nerves of taste and smell, because the food doesn't go directly to the child but to the stomach. An excess of activity is required. The abdomen must work overtime in a certain way, and so the need arises in the head for beyond-normal smells and tastes. The best care for the unborn child naturally requires an understanding of these matters.

Pregnant women thus often are not at all satisfied when they obtain what they momentarily crave; as soon as they have it, they crave another taste. Being also extremely moody, their taste is subject to abrupt change. One can appease them, however, by being kind to them and paying heed to what, in one's own opinion, is only a figment of their imagination. In the early months of pregnancy, women live in fantasies of tastes and smells. If you simply say to a pregnant woman, it is just your imagination, it is a real emotional slap to her. What is developing in her quite naturally due to the connection between the brain or head and the abdomen is repulsed. But if one cheers her up by being attentive, neither denying her wishes nor taking them literally, it is much easier to satisfy her. If, for example, one buys her something with vanilla flavor the second she craves it, by the time it is brought to her it may no longer be the right thing; she might say, “Yes, but now I want sauerkraut!” It is well that it should be so! You must realize that if something so extraordinary is to take place in her abdomen it is because the child's development must demand it, and the pregnant woman must therefore receive special consideration.

Indeed, this shows us a lot more. It shows us that a powerful influence is exerted on the child by the environment of soul and spirit in which the mother lives. With some insight, the following can be understood. There are children who are born with “water on the brain,” that is, with hydrocephalus. In most cases this can be traced back to the fact that the mother, who perhaps rightly sought stimulation in life, was bored stiff during the first months of pregnancy, particularly the first few weeks. Perhaps her husband frequently went out alone to the local pub and she, being left at home, was extremely bored. The result was that she lacked the energy required to influence the brain cells. Boredom makes her head empty; the empty head, in turn, imparts emptiness to the abdomen. It does not develop sufficient strength to hold the forces of the child's head together properly. The head swells up, becoming hydrocephalous. Other children are born with abnormally small heads, particularly the upper portion of the head, that is, with acrocephaly. Most of these cases are connected with the fact that during the first weeks of pregnancy the mother engaged in too much diversion and amused herself excessively. If such matters are observed properly, a relationship can always be noted between the child's development and the mother's mood of soul during the early weeks of pregnancy.

Naturally, much is accomplished with medicine, but regarding these questions we have as yet no real medicine today but only a kind of quackery, because the many relationships are not correctly discerned by a merely materialistic science. These relationships require individual observation in most instances, and during the embryonic life of the human being, and therefore during pregnancy, they can be observed particularly well. Consider the significantly increased abdominal activity during pregnancy; the abdomen must be terribly active. This, in turn, calls for the strongest possible activity of the forebrain. It is not surprising, therefore, that some mothers actually become a little crazy during the first stage of pregnancy. They become a little crazy, because the abdomen and the forebrain, which actually thinks, are closely related. One arrives at very remarkable and interesting results if one looks for the relationships between the abdomen and what humanity accomplishes spiritually. It is curious and funny that spiritual science must call attention to these matters, whereas materialistic science completely fails in this area.

It would be extraordinarily interesting, for example, to consider the following. You see, there were a great many philosophers in England—Hobbes, Bacon, Locke, Hume. These philosophers, even including John Stuart Mill, led essentially to the great rise of materialism. These philosophers all had such heavy thoughts that they could not penetrate the spiritual with their thoughts. They clung to matter with their thoughts. It would be extraordinarily interesting to examine the digestions of all these philosophers, these many philosophers. I am convinced they all suffered from constipation! Starting with Hobbes in the seventeenth century, and proceeding all the way into the nineteenth, this whole philosophy that brought us materialism was actually caused by the constipation of individual philosophers! This materialism could have been prevented—what I say now is not in earnest, I only wish to make a joke!—if one had given Hobbes, Bacon, Locke, and the others regular laxatives in their youth. Then all this materialism most likely would not have arisen.

It is indeed odd, you see, that something that people frequently call materialistic must be pointed out by spiritual science. But the reason for this is that when the human being is really observed, the spirit is revealed where others see only matter. Anthroposophy does not assume that the abdomen is only a chemical factory. I once told you that the liver is a wondrous organ, that the kidney with its functions is also a marvelous organ. Only by comprehending these organs will one find the spirit everywhere. If you stop finding the spirit in some area, if you think that digestion is a process that is too materialistic to be studied in a spiritual way, you then become a materialist. Indeed, materialism came into being through spiritual arrogance. I have told you this before, though it sounds remarkable: when the ancient Jews of the Old Testament had bad thoughts during the night, they did not blame the bad, unhealthy thoughts on their heads but on their kidneys. When they said, “This night God has affected my kidneys,” they were more correct than today's medicine. The ancient Jews also said that God reveals Himself to man not through man's head but directly through the activity of his kidneys and generally through his abdominal activity.

Considering this viewpoint, it is most interesting, though I don't know if you gentlemen have seen it, to watch an Orthodox Jew pray. When a devout Orthodox Jew prays, he does not take his phylactery out of a pocket that he wears over his heart or that hangs over his head. He wears his phylactery over his abdomen and prays with it in this position. People today naturally no longer know what the relationship is here, but those who long ago gave the ancient Jews their commandments were aware of the relationship. In western regions of Europe, people don't have much opportunity anymore to see this, but in eastern European regions it makes quite a special impression to observe how the old Jews pray. When they prepare for prayer, they take the phylactery out of the slit in their trousers; it then hangs around them and they pray.

This knowledge that humanity once possessed by means of various dreamlike, ancient clairvoyant forces has been lost, and humanity today is not advanced enough to rediscover the spirit in all matter. You can comprehend nothing if you simply take your ordinary thoughts into a laboratory and mechanically execute experiments, and so on. You are not thinking at all while doing this. You must experiment in such a way that something of the spirit emerges everywhere; for that to happen, your experiments must be arranged accordingly. And so one can say that it is funny that anthroposophy, the science of the spirit, has to point out how the human brain, the so-called noblest part, is connected with the lower abdomen, but it is simply so. Only a true science leads to these facts. Similarly, any number of things can cause a disorder of the heart, for example. It can come through an internal irregularity, but in most cases an irregular activity of the heart can be traced to some disorder in the midbrain, where the feelings are particularly based (see sketch, Diagram 1). It is interesting to discover that just as the abdomen is related to the forebrain, so this forebrain is related, from the viewpoint of the soul, to the will, and the midbrain is related to feeling. Actually, only the back part of the brain is related to thinking. If we look into the brain, we see that the hindbrain is related to breathing and to thinking. Breathing has, in fact, a pronounced relationship to thinking.

Picture the following case. A person lacking the benefits of Waldorf education, in which these things are frequently discussed, develops in his youth in such a way that he turns out to be a scoundrel. His feelings are confused, causing him to be malicious. What does this mean? It means that the soul does not work correctly in the midbrain. If the soul is not properly nourished, the heart's rhythm becomes irregular. You can cause an irregular rhythm of the heart and all sorts of diseases of the heart by developing into an ill-tempered person.

Naturally, if a woman in early pregnancy goes into a forest, let us say, and has the misfortune of discovering a person who has hanged himself from a tree and is already dead—if he is still twitching, it's even worse—she sustains a terrible shock. It becomes an image in her, and probably, unless other measures can be taken—usually by life itself, not by artificially induced means—she will give birth to a child who is pale, with a pointed chin and skinny limbs, and who is unable to move around properly. With a pregnant woman, just one such frightening sight suffices to affect the unborn child. In later life, when one is eighteen, nineteen, or twenty years old, to be a scoundrel only once won't hurt; one must become a habitual scoundrel, and that takes longer. With a pregnant woman, however, a single incident is enough.

The results of such experiments can reach much further. Imagine a young mother-to-be who is busy with her work. She hasn't been told that army maneuvers are being held nearby. Cannons begin to thunder, and her ears are given a frightful shock. Since hearing is strongly connected with the hindbrain as well as with the breathing, such a fright can cause a disorder of the breathing system of her developing child.

You might ask, “What is he saying? Why, he wants us to pay attention to every little detail in life!” Yes, gentlemen, if a healthy educational system and healthy social conditions existed, you wouldn't have to think at all about many of these things, since they would develop by force of habit like other routine matters. I don't believe that there are many men who, when they habitually beat their wives in the middle of every month, give it too much thought. They do it out of habit. There are such husbands. Why do they beat their wives? Because they have run out of money, they cannot go down to the local pub, so they amuse themselves at home by abusing their wives. These are habits that are formed. Well, gentlemen, if we had a sound educational system for everybody, we would acquire different habits. Were it known, for example, that army maneuvers would be held one morning and that there would be explosions, it should as a matter of course be called to the attention of any pregnant woman in the area. Something like this can become a habit. Sound education and socially acceptable conditions can give rise to a number of habits that need not be thought about any longer but simply carried out. This is something toward which we must work. Essentially, however, this can be accomplished only through proper education.

This is why the science of the spirit in particular will be in a position to explain the material world correctly. Materialism only looks at the material realm but is ignorant of all that lives in the material. It observes fever but does not know that fever is called forth by tremendously expanded brain activity. Materialism is always greatly astonished by shock but does not rightly recognize that shock comes from a drop of body temperature, because the proper “internal combustion” [Verbrennung] can no longer continue. Thus we can say that the way the head of a pregnant woman is stimulated is strongly connected with the child's development.

People pay no heed to what is contained in spiritual culture. A sound education will also gradually permeate everything we read and are told. Someday, for example, when people pay attention to what anthroposophy says, novels will perhaps be published for pregnant women. When pregnant women read them, they will receive impressions of ideal human beings. As a result, beautiful babies will be born who will grow to be strong, fine-looking human beings. What a woman does with her head during pregnancy becomes the source of the activity taking place in her abdomen. She shapes and forms the child with what she imagines, feels, and wills.

Here, spiritual science becomes tangible to the point where one can no longer say that the spirit has no influence on the human being. For the rest of his life, unless education sets it right later on, a person is under the influence of what his mother did during the first months of pregnancy. The later months are not as particularly important, because man has already been shaped, and definite forms have become fixed, but the first months are of particular importance and are full of significance. When one sees the physical origin of the human being in the womb, something reveals itself that in every respect points to spiritual science.

If one thinks reasonably, one can say to oneself that the warmth streaming down from above and the cold streaming up from below must always meet in the right way in the abdomen. One must care for the abdomen in the right way. This is something that must be seen, so that what comes from above can meet what comes from below in the right way. When we are clear that a person is so strongly influenced by his mother's experiences of soul and spirit that he can end up with a large or a small head, a ruined heart or breathing system, then we see that a person is, in fact, completely influenced by soul-spiritual considerations.

It can also happen that a mother-to-be, in the first or second months of pregnancy, could run into somebody with an unusually crooked nose, the likes of which she has never seen before. Unless some corrective measure is taken, in most cases the child will receive a crooked nose. You will even be able to see that in most cases if the woman was startled by the sight of a person whose nose was twisted to the right, the child will be born with a nose twisted to the left. Just as a man's right hand is connected with the left speech center in the brain, just as everything is reversed in the human being, so the twist of the nose is also reversed. We can conclude that if someone has a crooked nose, he most likely has it because his mother was frightened by someone with a crooked nose. A person has many other features. Materialistic science, when it doesn't know something's origin, always talks of heredity. If one has a crooked nose—well, that's inherited; the red skin tone of another—that's inherited, too. Things are not like this, however. They arise from causes such as I have related. The concept of heredity is one of the most ambiguous held by modern science. If you look at a person and see a twisted nose or a birthmark, this does not necessarily indicate that the mother saw the same birthmark. She might have seen something else that caused the child's blood to flow in the wrong direction. These are all deviations from the normal human form, but there is indeed a normal human form.

One cannot say simply that deviations from the normal human form do not come from bodily but from spiritual experiences while still maintaining that the entire human being comes merely from the belly of the mother, from that which is within the material realm! If one wishes to explain deviations spiritually, one must explain the entire human being spiritually. Naturally, the mother no more than the father can produce a human being spiritually. To do so would require the production of something impossible, that is, the art of being human, which is infinite. We are led to understand, therefore, that man already exists prior to birth as a spiritual being, and as soul he united with what is made available to him corporeally. Only regarding abnormal features can the embryo be influenced spiritually. It is much more remarkable, however, that I have a nose in the middle of my face or that I have two eyes! If I am born with a crooked nose, that is an abnormal feature, but recall the nose in the middle of the face with its marvelous normal form, which I recently explained to you, and the eye—what a wonder-filled thing! All this does not grow out of the mother's womb; it is something that already exists in the soul realm before the human being arises in the womb.

Here, correctly understood, natural science points to what human life is like in the spiritual world before conception. Today's materialists will naturally say that this is fantasy. Why do they say this? All the ancient people who, in primordial human times, still possessed certain dreamlike perceptions, which we no longer have, knew that man exists before he appears on earth. Throughout the Middle Ages, however, it was forbidden by decree of the Church to think of so-called pre-existence, which means pre-earthly existence; the Church forbade it. When a materialist agitates today, the rostrum is only the continuation of the medieval pulpit, and though he no longer speaks the language of those preachers, using instead the words of an agitator, he only says what medieval sermons stated long ago. Materialism has simply taken over the medieval preachings, and, though they are not aware of. it, today's materialists basically elaborate on what the Church taught. Materialism stems basically from the Church of the Middle Ages. Then, no soul was permitted to have existed before its earthly life. The intention was to teach people that God creates the soul when conception takes place. If a couple were in the mood to let conception occur—we know that in many instances this can be a mood of the moment—the Good Lord had to move quickly and create a soul for them! This is what the Church edict really implied and what one was supposed to believe.

It is not a sensible viewpoint, however, to make God the servant of the moods of human beings, so that he must hurriedly produce a soul when they happen to be in a mood to let conception take place. If you give this some thought, you discover what is actually contained in the materialistic viewpoint, which undermines human dignity. A real and true knowledge of the human being leads us instead to the realization that the soul is already there, has always lived. It descends to what is offered it through the human seed and its fertilization.

Anthroposophy has not, therefore, arrived back at the spirit because of some arbitrary fantasy but simply because it must, because it takes scientific knowledge seriously, which the others do not. People study natural science, which would lead to the spirit, but they are too lazy to come through natural science to the spirit on their own. That would require a little effort on the part of their heads. Instead, they allow some old teachers to deprive them of the spirit, and yet they still manage to be religious! Then they are dishonest, however; it is like keeping two sets of books. A person who is consistent in his reckoning must ascend from nature to spirit, and matters such as those we have discussed today, for example, will lead us there.

This was the first lecture given to the workmen after the burning of the Goetheanum. As a demonstration of their sympathy, all present stood when Rudolf Steiner entered.

Dr. Steiner: It is difficult to put into words the sorrow I feel. I know of your deep sympathy, so let me be brief. May I take this opportunity to call attention to the fact that as early as January 23, 1921, here in this hall, I read from a brochure a statement made by an opponent, indeed, one can already say an enemy, that went like this:

There are plenty of spiritual sparks of fire that strike like lightning against the wooden mouse trap. It will require quite a bit of cleverness on Steiner's part to work in a conciliatory manner so as to prevent a real spark of fire from bringing the Dornach grandeur to an inglorious end some day.

You see, with such inflammatory talk it is not surprising when something like the fire occurs, and in view of such vehement hostility it was something that could easily be feared. You can understand why it was easy to fear. It is true, however, that even now one can see what certain groups think about the matter. We need only consider the antagonism contained in the poor taste of newspapers, which now, after the Goetheanum has been destroyed, ask, “Didn't that `clairvoyant' Steiner foresee this fire?” That such attitudes are also evidence of a great stupidity is something I don't wish to talk about now. It points to a malicious degree of hostility, however, that some people find it at all necessary to publish such statements! One learns from this what people think and how crude things are today. It is indeed crude!

You can be sure, however, that I will never let anything divert me from my path, come what may. As long as I live, I shall represent my cause and will continue in the same way as I have done up to now. Also, I naturally hope that there will be no interruption here in any area, so that in the future we can work together here at this location in the same way as we have before; at least, that is my intention. Come what may, my thought is that the building will have to be reconstructed in some form; to be sure, no effort will be spared toward that end. We must therefore go on in the same way as before; this is simply an inner commitment.

Today, I wish to make use of our time by saying a few things to you that relate to the subject we discussed a little before this sad event. I tried to show you that a true science must work toward recognizing again the soul-spiritual aspects of the human being. I don't believe you have any idea of how emotionally charged is the reaction that this matter calls forth today within scientific circles. These scientific circles, as they call themselves today, which are taken to be something special by the layman, are the very ones that stand ready to make common cause with all existing hostile forces when it is a matter of proceeding against the anthroposophical movement. You must see that the hatred against the anthroposophical movement is by no means a slight matter. During the days when the tragedy took place, a report reached me, for example, of the formation of an association that calls itself “The Association of Non-Anthroposophical Experts on Anthroposophy.” They are people who naturally have nothing to do with the accident here but who are part of the whole opposition. The report concludes with the words, “This calls for a life-or-death struggle. The side that has the Holy Spirit will gain victory.”

It is obvious from the idiotic things said by these people, who want a life-or-death struggle, that the spirit—leaving the Holy Spirit completely aside—is not with these people. That is evident at once from the minutes of their meeting. Nevertheless, the spirit of hatred that exists is expressed in the sentence, “This calls for a life-or-death struggle.” People do wage this struggle, and the number of opponents is indeed not small. So-called scientific groups participate in these affairs today and in a most intensive way at that.

You see, I must continue to stress this, because the authority of science is so strong today. In order to know something, one turns to a so-called scientific expert, because this is the way things are arranged. Laymen don't know the means by which such persons become “experts” and that one can be the greatest idiot and yet be an “expert” with certifications, etc. These matters must be fully comprehended, and it is therefore important to get to the bottom of things and understand what really lies at their foundation. The very first sentences taught little children in school today—not directly, but indirectly—are mostly rubbish! Things that are considered self-evident today are in fact rubbish.

One is attacked from all sides today if one says, it is nonsense that the brain thinks, for it is agreed everywhere that the brain thinks and that where there is no brain, there can be no thinking, that there are no thoughts where no brain exists. Well, from my lectures you will have seen that the brain naturally plays its part in, and has a significance for, thinking. But if those people, who in fact make little use of their brains, claim that the brain is a sort of machine with which one thinks, then this is mere thoughtlessness. It is not surprising when a simple, uneducated person believes this, because he is not in possession of all the facts and so he adheres to the voice of the authority. No logic and real thinking, however, are contained in the statement that the brain thinks, and today I shall give you a number of examples to prove it.

If you look at a small beetle, you can easily see that it has a small head. If you dissect the head of such a beetle—the burying beetle, for instance—you discover nothing like a brain, which is supposed to be the thinking apparatus. Naturally, the tiny beetle has no brain in this sense but only a little lump, a lump of nerves, you could say. It does not have even the beginnings of a complete brain.

Now, I will relate a scene to you as an example, but before I give you this example I must tell you that these burying beetles always follow the lifelong habit of laying their eggs, and maggots hatch from them that only later change into beetles. As soon as they have emerged from the eggs, these tiny maggots require meat for their nourishment. They could not live without it. So, what does the burying beetle do? It searches in the field for a dead mouse or a dead bird or a mole, and having discovered one—a dead mouse, for example—it runs home again, only to return not alone but with a number of other beetles. These beetles that it has returned with run all around the mouse. Picture the mouse here (sketching); the beetle has discovered it; it runs off and then returns with a number of other burying-beetles. You see them run all around it. Occasionally, you notice that they all run away. At other times, you will see the beetles arrive, run around the dead mouse, and then start digging. First, they dig the ground under the mouse and then all around it. The mouse gradually sinks deeper and deeper into the earth as they continue digging. They dig until the mouse finally falls into the ground. They then fetch the females, who lay their eggs in it. Finally, they cover the hole completely so that passersby wouldn't notice it. I mentioned earlier that sometimes you can observe the beetles leave without returning. When you look into this, you find that the ground is too hard to dig. The beetles seem to have realized that here they could do nothing. Whenever they stay and begin digging, the ground is soft.

It is unbelievably strange but true that only ten or twelve beetles return with the one that makes the discovery, never forty or fifty. Only as many beetles return as are required to do the work. The first beetle doesn't bring more helpers than it needs, nor does it bring fewer. It arrives with just the right number to do the job. This sounds unbelievable, but what I am telling you is not a fairy tale. People have been able to demonstrate this phenomenon with all kinds of experiments. It's absolutely true.

The person who first described the activity of these beetles wasn't a superstitious person but one who had sound judgment. He was a friend of the botanist, Gleditsch, and was a scientist in the first half of the nineteenth century, an age when science was still on a sounder basis. He was involved in experimental work and once used toads in his experiments. These tests were intended for something completely different—you know that electricity was first discovered through work on a frog's thigh—and he needed to dry a dead toad. What did this natural scientist do? He took it outside and pinned the dead toad to a small piece of wood to let the sun dry it quickly. After a while he returned to check it and found a number of beetles around it hard at work. He decided to leave the dead toad alone and watch what these fellows, the beetles, were up to. What did they do? They continued digging until the wood fell and the toad had a place in the ground, in the hole; then the females were allowed to lay their eggs in it. That done, the beetles covered the toad and the wood it was pinned to with earth. Now, if a human being were to do that, one would think he also buried the stick in order to hide every trace. So you see, the burying beetles do exactly what a clever human being would do; indeed, I am convinced that a number of stupid people wouldn't do any—where near as well. You see, therefore, that what is called cleverness, intelligence, is present without the beetles possessing it.

One might call this nonsense and say that it need not be looked upon as intelligence, that it is stupid to say it is intelligence since it is simply instinct. Of course, I consider it stupid for a person to use the word “instinct” in this case, thus getting on the wrong track. One needs a word, however, and “instinct” is used for everything, so that one need not think at all. I must learn to know the issue itself—it is all the same what I call it—I must learn to know the issue. Still, one might object by saying, “All right, but what he has told, us is still nonsense. The beetles are born with this ability; they pass it on genetically; one need not think of intelligence here. It is inherent in their physical nature, and there is no need to think that these beetles possess intelligence.”

Now I shall tell you another story that was told by a person of incontestable authority, a story that has also been reported by others but above all by Darwin, an incontestable source; after all, people swear by Darwin, don't they? He observed this activity in wasps, not beetles. Wasps have brains that are no larger than those of beetles. Their larvae also require meat as soon as they hatch. Now, these wasps are weaker than beetles, even when they band together, so they cannot handle moles or dead toads but prefer smaller creatures that they can handle without help. This is why such wasps gather little animals like flies and such for their young.

Darwin, who is considered to be the greatest natural scientist of the nineteenth century, observed a wasp who needed such an animal, a female wasp, heavy with eggs, looking for an insect into which to lay them. Finding a fly, a dead fly, on the ground, she tried to fly away with it, but it was too difficult for her. What did the wasp do? It bit off the fly's head and hind quarters and flew off with the breast and wings, which it could manage. Without the head and hind quarters of the fly, the wasp could now fly. Now—as I said, Darwin watched all this—a strong breeze was blowing and the wasp could not fly forward because the fly's wings caught the wind. The two wings caught the wind, and it could not fly forward. Again, what did the wasp do, laden with the fly? It landed on the ground, bit off the two wings, and flew away with the fly's breast without the wings.

In this case it is impossible to say that this is anything else but deliberate, since the wasp, after all, accommodated itself to the wind. This cannot be inherent in the wasp, to bite off the wings. It must be what is called intelligence that motivates the insect. The wasp tells itself that if the wings are discarded, the wind won't catch in them. It is impossible for this to be inherited; what exists there is what one calls deliberation; consequently, one must admit that intelligence is really at work here. Here intelligence is at work.

Now you can see how scientists proceeded in the nineteenth century. I purposely mentioned to you Darwin, who observed this. What was his conclusion, however? Darwin said that everything that confronts us in animals is produced only through heredity and through natural selection, and so forth.

In order to set up theories, people simply suppress what they themselves know. This is the essential point, that people suppress what they know to set up convenient theories. Such theories are by no means scientific and only throw sand in the eyes of the public. Darwin was certainly a great man, and nobody has acknowledged his positive accomplishments in a more kindly way than I. I have written everything possible in Darwin's favor, but, oddly enough, we must realize that even those who have made significant contributions have suffered from the malady of having no eyes for facts. In spite of the great scientific triumphs made in the external world, it is characteristic of scientists of the nineteenth century that people completely lost their sense for facts, and the facts were simply suppressed.

Now, let's go further. Let's consider other insects. In these matters one must study insects, because they can illuminate our subject particularly well; we can be quite sure that in their case they do not owe their intelligence to having a large brain, because this they certainly don't have. Therefore, one must study insects in this matter. Indeed, not only are they able to illuminate the things I have just described but many others as well. Insects lay their eggs, and a mature insect never emerges from them but only little worms. With butterflies, which are insects, it is even more complicated. First, a little worm appears, a caterpillar; it pupates, and finally from the chrysalis emerges the butterfly. This is certainly quite a transformation, but this transformation actually occurs with all insects. You see, there are some insects that, when they are fully mature, feed only on plants. I am not agitating for vegetarianism, as you know, gentlemen, but these insects are vegetarians. They eat only plants. The strange thing is that their larvae, the maggots, require meat when they hatch. These insects therefore have a great peculiarity, that they are born with a completely different food preference from that which they later acquire. They convert to plant food only when they are fully developed insects. When they are still little children and look completely different—like maggots or worms—they feed on meat.

What do these mature insects do? They seek out other insects, mostly caterpillars, and lay their eggs on their backs. They themselves no longer have an appetite for meat, but they know that maggots requiring meat will hatch from their eggs. Therefore, they lay their eggs in the body of such a caterpillar or some such animal. Though one can marvel at this cleverness, there is much more. One can even say that these newly hatched maggots are already clever. Consider that some maggot species depend on living flesh for food. When it is time to lay the eggs, this insect, which has a stinger, punctures another living insect that is larger and lays many eggs within it. Sometimes numerous eggs are thus deposited, filling the caterpillar's body, and from which the maggots hatch. The maggots are then within the body of this other insect. These eggs are only deposited in live insects, because if the animal in which the eggs are laid were to die, the eggs would be lost, since the maggots can only survive on living flesh. Consider, therefore, that if a maggot were to destroy a vital organ in the host insect, thus causing its death, all the other maggots hatching from the eggs would perish. These little creatures are so clever, however, that nothing is ever eaten in the living caterpillar except those parts not needed for its survival. All vital organs are spared, and the caterpillar stays alive. Regardless of how many eggs are deposited, only so much is consumed as to ensure the host insect's life.

You see, these things are known but are simply suppressed. People know it but suppress it, and it isn't well received, naturally, when one points them out, because this not only shows up the incapability but the downright dishonesty of official science.

In the case of animals and insects you can see that it is possible to say that they certainly do not possess intelligence, because they have no apparatus for intelligence, that is, brains. Nevertheless, intelligence is working in what they do, and it must be admitted that intelligence is there. The animals do not deliberate; deliberation would require a brain; animals don't deliberate, but what takes place in their activities is intelligent. Indeed, it happens that animals even have something similar to memory. They have no recollection but something akin to it. You can observe this, for instance, if you are a bee keeper. Here stands a beehive. The bees hatch. For the sake of an experiment, you move the hive to a nearby spot. The bees return to the first location; naturally, this is “instinct,” and there is no need to be surprised about it; they fly in the direction from which they flew away. Now, however, they begin to look everywhere for the hive and fly around seeking it. They arrive at the new location but do not enter the hive immediately. Instead, they swarm around it for a long time, and one can definitely conclude that they are examining it to see if it is their own! The burying beetle does the same when it examines the ground to see if it is hard or soft. While bees have no recollection, the above incident shows that they nevertheless possess something similar to memory; namely, they must determine whether it is the same beehive. We do this with our memory; bees do it with something similar.

You see, what works as intelligence through the human head is at work everywhere. Intelligence is at work everywhere; even in insects there is marvelous intelligence. Picture the wonderful intelligence at work when the larvae that hatch inside the caterpillar's body do not feed immediately on its stomach. If they did, all the maggots would perish. Compared with the tactics employed by humans during war, the intelligence ruling the insect arouses respect and exposes the foolishness of human beings. In this regard, human beings have no reason to claim sole possession of intelligence.

I'll tell you something else now. You are all familiar with paper. You all know that the paper we have today was invented no earlier than four or five hundred years ago. Before this, parchment and all sorts of materials were used for writing. Civilized man discovered so-called rag paper just four or five centuries ago. Before this, man wrote on leather and so on. How was paper discovered? One had to discover how to mix together certain substances in a specific way. Perhaps one of you has been in a paper factory. At first, the paper is liquid; it is then solidified, etc. It is produced in a purely artificial way through various chemical and mechanical means. Perhaps you've not only seen paper but also now and then a wasps' nest. A wasps' nest is built like this (sketching). It is attached to something and formed so the wasps can fly into it. It is grey, not white—but paper can be grey, too—and this wasps' nest is real paper. If one asks, what is a wasps' nest made of chemically, chemically it is identical with paper. It is real paper.

Wasps, however, have been building their nests for thousands and thousands of years, not just four or five hundred. You can see, therefore, that wasps manufactured paper much earlier than humans. That's simply a fact: the wasps' nest is made of paper. If, thousands of years ago, people had been clever enough to examine the substance of a wasps' nest, they would have discovered paper then. Chemistry was not that advanced, however; neither was writing, through which some things have also come about that do not exactly serve man. In any case, the wasp has made paper for an immeasurably longer time than the human being has.

Naturally, I could go on, not for hours but for days, to speak of how intelligence pervades everything and is found everywhere. Man simply gathers this intelligence that is spread out in the world and puts it to use. Owing to his well-developed brain, he can put to his own use what permeates the world. Thanks to his brain, he can utilize the intelligence contained in all things for his own benefit.

Our brain is not given us for the purpose of producing intelligence. It is sheer nonsense to believe that we produce intelligence. It is as stupid as saying, “I went to the pond with a water pitcher to fetch water. Look, it contains water now; a minute ago there was none; the water, therefore, materialized from the walls of the pitcher!” Everybody will say that is nonsense. The water came from the pond; it was not produced by the pitcher. The experts, however, point to the brain, which simply collects intelligence because it is present in everything, like the water, and claim that intelligence emerges from within it. It is as foolish as saying that water is produced by the pitcher. After all, intelligence is even present where there is no brain, just as the pond does not depend on the water pitcher. Intelligence exists everywhere, and man can take hold of it. Just as the water from the pitcher can be put to use, so man can make use of his brain when he gathers the intelligence that is present everywhere in the world. To this day, however, he is not making use of it in a particularly outstanding manner.

You can see that it is a matter of correct thinking. But those who never think correctly—for they show that they cannot think correctly—claim that intelligence is produced by the brain. This is as foolish as claiming that water from a pond is produced by its container. Such foolishness, however, is science today. Actually, these matters should be obvious; one should simply realize that intelligence is something that must be gathered together.

Now, you can take your brain and resolve to gather intelligence somewhere. It doesn't collect intelligence any more than the empty water pitcher, which, when you put it away, remains empty. By itself the water pitcher cannot fetch water, nor does the brain collect intelligence by itself. You cannot leave the brain to its own devices and expect it to function any more than the water pitcher. What must be present so that the brain can gather intelligence? The empty water pitcher alone can be compared to the belief that man consists only of blood, nerves, and brain. Something else must be present that does the collecting and that gathers intelligence by means of the brain. It is the soul—spiritual element of man that does the collecting. It enters man as I described recently in the lecture on embryonic development. It has previously existed in the soul—spiritual world and only makes use of the physical. If the facts are not suppressed, if one sees that intelligence, like water, pervades everything and, like water in a pitcher, must be gathered together, then—if one is a serious scientist and not a charlatan—one must search for the gatherer. This is simply what follows from the use of clear reason. It is not true that the anthroposophical science of the spirit is less scientific than ordinary science; it is much more scientific, much more scientific.

The day before yesterday, one could see the kind of logic people employ. As you know, a natural scientific course was recently held here. I have already told you of experiments conducted in Stuttgart concerning the task of the spleen. We confirmed that the spleen has the task of serving as a sort of regulator of the digestive rhythm. The blood circulation has a definite rhythm, as found in the pulse with its seventy—two beats per minute. These are related to the intake of food. People also pay a little heed to a rhythmic intake of food; they are not too good at it, however, and frequently have no set mealtime. Worse yet, people indiscriminately partake of foods that are useful for them and those that are not. There is no regularity here as there is in the blood. If, for example, I eat at one o'clock instead of two o'clock, this is an irregularity. The blood circulation, after all, doesn't work that way and doesn't produce a different pulse when it requires nourishment. This is where the spleen takes over. We have tried to demonstrate this with experiments and have been successful to a degree. More experiments are needed and must be done soon, but we have been able to show to some extent that the spleen is a regulator. Though we might have irregular eating habits, the spleen keeps food in the intestines as long as the blood needs it. If we don't starve ourselves too much—if we starve ourselves too much even the spleen would be unable to function properly—the spleen supplies the blood with fat taken from our own body.

You see, because we were completely honest, Dr. Kolisko quite honestly stated in her book that in my medical course I indicated that the spleen has this task, and she then proceeded with experiments to confirm this. Then a professor in Munich said that this was easy; she had already received the indications from anthroposophy and so had them in her pocket. It is not supposed to be hypothetical-deductive science if one starts with indications and then conducts experiments. He therefore said that this isn't hypothetical-deductive science.

Why does the professor say that? Because people do not wish to work with a thought as their guideline. Instead, they want a lot of material delivered to their laboratories, and they blindly begin to experiment until they happen on some result. They call this hypothetical-deductive science, but there is no hypothesis in it at all. Occasionally, the most significant discoveries are made by chance. Then, well—even a blind dog sometimes finds a morsel! How could we progress, however, if in our laboratories our work did not follow our ideas?

The professor in Munich says that it is not hypothetical-deductive science for one to work with indications. Now, imagine that somewhere experiments had been conducted that proved the spleen's function but that a fire had destroyed the reports of the work. Only the final result would be known. Couldn't somebody come along and say that he would repeat these experiments? It would not be any different from our starting out with these indications. The same professor would also have to object to that as being unscientific. Now, wouldn't that be absurd? The only difference here is that I have made my indications by tracing the spiritual course of the matter, but I have done it in such a way that it can readily be followed according to anatomical science. Then, through experiments, another person seeks affirmation of what had been precisely indicated. Our task here was simply to show correct physical proof for what I had said. There is no logical difference between my knowledge acquired by spiritual scientific means and what another person has already found earlier by means of experiments.

What does it indicate when someone considers it to be hypothetical-deductive science when something has been discovered by physical means, though the descriptions of the tests may have been burned, while anything done by anthroposophy is not considered hypothetical-deductive science? It indicates that one is not honest and that from the first one denounces anything coming from anthroposophy. People aren't really concerned about hypothetical-deductive science; they are so foolish that they don't notice that this is logical nonsense. They say that ours is not hypothetical-deductive science not because it would be logical to say so but only because it derives from anthroposophy. People are too foolish to comprehend what comes from anthroposophy. Naturally, their lack of comprehension makes them angry, and therefore they denounce it. The real reason anthroposophy is considered heresy is that those who are engaged in so-called science do not think and cannot understand anthroposophy. This is an aspect of our entire civilization. It is possible today to be a great scientist or scholar without being able really to think. In the future, one must truly cultivate honesty, an honesty that takes into account all the facts, not only those that conveniently fit one's pet theory, thus throwing sand in the eyes of the public.

The hatred of anthroposophy is based in large part on anthroposophy's honesty, something people don't want to grant it. If people had a keener sense for truth, they would often stop writing after the first sentence. Since all their arguments against anthroposophy would collapse, however, if anthroposophy were properly studied, they invent all kinds of fabrications concerning it. People inventing fabrications about anthroposophy don't care about truth, and once they start telling lies, they go further. The serious defamations of anthroposophy thus arise. What is the result? A person who cannot see through all this believes that anthroposophists engage in devilry. Such a person cannot see through this, because he naturally believes the authorities, who do not speak the truth. Anthroposophy suffers most of all from these lies that are circulated about it, whereas its one aim is to focus on the facts and be a real science.

In view of the painful tragedy that has struck here, we must at least look into the real state of affairs and realize how anthroposophy is being slandered out of a spirit of pure falsehood.

I myself am absolutely opposed to any agitation coming from our side. Naturally, I cannot stop everything, but when I speak to you, I am strictly pointing out facts. This is all I have done today, and from these facts I have drawn a general characterization of scientific life. You must admit to yourselves that where such facts are ignored there is no desire to create real science but only a desire to throw sand in the eyes of the public, even if in a quite unconscious way. People would have to be much more clever to see through this.

We shall continue on Monday. If you have something to ask, I would like you to speak entirely from your hearts. I, for one, don't wish to be deterred by the great tragedy that has struck here. This is why I didn't want to waste my time lamenting but wanted to tell you something useful.

Dr. Steiner: Does anyone have a question on his mind?

A question is asked concerning alcohol, its negative effects, etc.

Do you mean the extent to which alcohol generally is detrimental to health? Well, alcohol's initial effect is quite obvious, because it influences what we have been describing in man all along, that is, the entire constitution of the soul. In the first place, through alcohol, a person suffers a form of spiritual confusion so strong that he becomes subject to passions that otherwise are weak in him and can easily be suppressed by his reason. A person thus appears more sensible if he has had no alcohol than if he drinks. To begin with, alcohol has a stimulating influence on the blood, causing an increased circulation of the blood. This, in turn, arouses a person's passions; for example, he may more readily become furious, whereas otherwise he can control his anger more easily. So you can see that the first effect of alcohol is exercised on man's reason—indeed, on his whole life of soul.

After alcohol has remained for a certain length of time in the organism, it causes another symptom that you know well, called a hangover; the appearance of a hangover shows you that the entire organism objects to the initial effect of alcohol. What does it mean for a person to have a hangover? As a rule, it appears in the morning after an evening of too much drinking. Due to the drinking the night before, the circulation of a person's blood is strongly agitated. The increased movement that otherwise would have taken its course at a much slower pace uses up a lot of energy.

Pay close attention to this! Let us assume that the body accomplishes a certain activity within twenty-four hours. When somebody consumes a goodly amount of alcohol, the same activity is completed in perhaps twelve or even six hours. The body thus deprives itself of inner activity. People who are in the habit of drinking every once in a while, therefore, instinctively do something before the hangover appears: they eat heartily. Why do they do this? They eat heartily either to avoid a hangover altogether or so that its effects the next day are at least milder so that they can work.

What happens, say, if a person has drunk himself into a visible state of intoxication and then consumes, let us say, a large hotdog? He stimulates again what has been used up by the previous excessive activity. But if, because he is not a habitual drinker, he doesn't do this—habitual drinkers do eat—and he forgets to eat that hotdog, he then will suffer the hangover, basically because his body is no longer able to engage in increased inner activity. When the body does not function correctly, however, waste products, in particular uric acid, are deposited everywhere. Since the head is the most difficult to supply, the waste products are deposited there. If a person has, through alcohol consumption, depleted the inner activity of the body during the night, he walks around the next morning with his head in the condition that is normal for his intestines, that is, filled with refuse. An immediate revolt by the body is brought about when, through the intake of alcohol, too much activity is demanded of it.

As I have mentioned to you before in these lectures, man has a much higher tolerance—I don't mean only regarding alcohol but generally—and can take much more abuse than is normally assumed. He is capable of readjustment for a long time. Some people even make use of a most deceptive, most questionable antidote against a hangover. When they come home or arise the next morning with a powerful hangover, what do they do? Surely, you have seen this; they continue drinking, making the morning pint into a special cure.

What does this continued drinking signify? During the night, through the agitation of the blood, the body has been deprived of activity. This activity is now missing in the morning. Through renewed drinking, the body is stimulated once again, so that the last remnants of activity are consumed. Since these last remnants dispose of the major part of the refuse, the hangover disappears to a degree from the head but remains that much more in the rest of the body. People are, however, less aware of that. Additional drinking in the morning thus unconsciously transfers the hangover to the rest of the organism. Only now, when this occurs, does the real misery for the body begin. Those alcoholics who drive away a hangover with more drinking are in the worst shape, because gradually, as this is repeated, the entire body is ruined.

Still, however, because man can endure a good deal, it is almost impossible to ruin the body that quickly. Therefore, the first thing that happens to a real alcoholic is that he suffers from a form of delirium. This does not as yet indicate total ruin. When delirium tremens, as it is called in medicine, sets in, people see certain kinds of animals, mice and the like, running all over the place. They suffer a form of persecution complex. Delirium tremens is connected with the phenomenon of people seeing themselves surrounded and attacked from all sides by small animals, especially mice. This is something that even has a historical background. There are structures called “mice towers” (Mäusetürme). Usually, they have come by their name through somebody in some earlier time having been incarcerated in them who suffered from delirium tremens, and, though some real mice might well have been there too, this person was plagued by thousands upon thousands of mice that he merely imagined all around himself.

You can see, therefore, that the ruinous effects of alcohol can only slowly be driven into the body; the body resists these effects that are produced by alcohol for a long time.

What happens when people who have been drinking heavily for some time are suddenly bothered by their conscience and, having some energy left, stop drinking? It is an interesting fact that if they had not suffered from delirium tremens before, now, after abstaining from alcohol, they sometimes get it. Here we find something of interest, when people's consciences suddenly stir. They have been drinking for a while, let us say, drinking since early in the morning, and then suddenly the conscience stirs and they stop drinking. What happens then? If they had not had delirium tremens earlier, they struggle with it now. This is the interesting fact, that sometimes those who have been drinking for a long time begin suffering from delirium tremens when they stop drinking.

This is one of the most important signs that man must be viewed in such a way that the head is seen to work differently from the rest of the body. In the last lectures I mentioned many aspects of this to you. As long as a person suffers only in his head from the side effects of drinking, his overall condition is still tolerable; the effects have not yet permeated the entire body. When they have penetrated, however, and the person leaves off alcohol, the rest of the body really revolts by way of the brain and he suffers from delirium tremens just because he discontinued drinking.

One thus can say that the bodily counterpart for the most important functions of the soul is found in human blood. You probably know that some people suffer from persecution complexes, seeing all sorts of figures that are not there. Particularly in earlier times, such persons were bled—not a bad remedy, really. You must not believe that all people in the past were as superstitious as is generally assumed today. Blood-letting was not something derived from superstition. People were bled primarily by applying leeches somewhere on the body that drew off blood. The blood thus was less active. Not necessarily in the case of alcoholics, but for other attacks of insanity blood was less active, and the person fared better.

As I have mentioned, the nervous system is very closely related to the foundations of the properties of the soul, but it is much less important for the human will. The nervous system is important for reason, but for the human will it has much less significance than the blood.

Now, when you see that alcohol pre-eminently attacks the blood, it is clear from the body's strong reaction against alcohol's effects that the blood is well protected against alcohol. The blood is extraordinarily well protected against the assault of alcohol in human beings. By what means is the blood so strongly protected against this assault? We must ask further, then, where do the most important ingredients of the blood actually originate?

Remember that I told you that blood consists of red corpuscles containing iron, which swim around in the so-called blood serum, and it also consists of white corpuscles. I have told you that the most significant components of blood are the red and white corpuscles. We shall now disregard the corpuscles connected with the spleen's activity, which, in our tests in Stuttgart, we termed the “regulators.” There are many components in the blood, but we want now to focus only on the red and white corpuscles, asking where in the body these corpuscles originate. These corpuscles originate in a most special place. If you examine the thigh bone from the hip to the knee, if you think of the bone in the arm, or any long bone, you will find in these bones the so-called bone marrow. The marrow is in there, the bone marrow. And you see, gentlemen, the red and white corpuscles originate in this bone marrow and migrate from it first into the arteries. The human body is arranged in such a way that the blood, at least the most important part of it, is produced in the inner hollows of the bones.

If this is the case, you can say to yourself: in so far as its production is concerned, the blood is indeed well protected from harm. In fact, alcohol must be consumed for a long time and in large quantities to damage the bone to the point of penetrating it to the innermost part, to the bone marrow, and destroying the bone marrow so that no more red and white corpuscles are produced. Only then, after the effects of drinking alcohol have reached the bone marrow, does the really ruinous process begin for the human being.

Now, it is true that regarding their intellects and soul qualities, humans are in many ways alike; regarding the blood, however, there is a marked difference between man and woman. It is a difference that one is not always aware of but that is nevertheless clearly evident. This is that the influence on human beings of the red and white corpuscles that are produced within the hollows of the bone is such that the red corpuscles are more important for the woman and the white are more important for the man. This is very important: the red corpuscles are more important with the woman and the white with the man.

This is because the woman, as you know, every four weeks has her menstrual period, which is actually an activity that the human body undertakes to eliminate something that must be eliminated, red corpuscles. A man, however, does not have menstrual periods, and you also know that his semen is not derived directly from red blood. It has its origin in white corpuscles. Although considerably transformed, in the end they turn into the main ingredient of semen. Thus, regarding what affects human reproduction, we must go to the protected bone marrow to investigate the means by which the human reproductive capacity can be influenced physically. Indeed, the human reproductive capacity can be physically affected precisely through the bone marrow within the bone.

After having been produced in the bone marrow, the red and white corpuscles naturally enter the blood stream. When a woman now drinks alcohol, it is the red corpuscles that are particularly affected. The red corpuscles contain iron, are somewhat heavy, and possess something of the earth's heaviness. When a woman drinks, it affects her in such a way that there is too much heaviness in her. When a pregnant woman drinks, therefore, her developing child becomes too heavy and cannot inwardly form its organs properly. It does not develop properly inwardly, and its inner organs are not in order. In this round-about-way, gentlemen, the harmful influence of alcohol is expressed in the woman.

In men, alcohol primarily affects the white corpuscles. If conception takes place when a man is under the influence of alcohol, or when his system is generally contaminated by the effects of alcoholism, a man's semen is ruined in a way, becoming too restless. When conception takes place, the tiny egg is released from the mother's organism. This can only be seen with a microscope. From the male, a great number of microscopic sperm are released, each one of which has something resembling a tail attached to it. The seminal fluid contains countless numbers of such sperm. This tail, which is like a fine hair, gives the sperm great restlessness. They make the most complicated movements, and naturally one sperm must reach the egg first. The one that reaches the egg first penetrates it. The sperm is much smaller than the egg. Although the egg can be perceived only with a microscope, the sperm is still smaller. As soon as the egg has received it, a membrane forms around the egg, thereby preventing penetration by the rest of the sperm cells. Generally, only one sperm can enter the egg. As soon as one has penetrated, a membrane is formed around the egg, and the others must retreat.

You see, therefore, it is most ingeniously arranged. Now, the sperm's restlessness is greatly increased through alcohol, so that conception occurs under the influence of semen that is extraordinarily lively. If the father is a heavy drinker when conception occurs, the child's nerve-sense system will be affected. The woman's drinking harms the child's inner organs because of the heaviness that ensues. The man's drinking harms the child's nervous system. All the activities are damaged that should be present in the right way as the child grows up.

We therefore can say that if a woman drinks, the earthly element in the human being is ruined; if a man drinks, the element of movement, the airy element that fills the earth's surroundings and that man carries within himself, is ruined. When both parents drink, therefore, the embryo is harmed from two different sides. Naturally, this is not a proper conception; while conception is possible, however, proper growth of the embryo is not. On the one hand, the egg's tendency toward heaviness tries to prevail; on the other, everything in it is in restless motion, and one tendency contradicts the other. If both parents are alcoholics and conception occurs, the masculine element contradicts the feminine. To those who understand the entire relationship, it becomes quite clear that in the case of habitual drinkers exceedingly harmful elements actually arise in their offspring. People do not wish to believe this, because the effects of heavy drinking in men and women are not so obvious, relatively speaking. This is only because the blood is so well protected, however, being produced, after all, in the bone marrow, and because people must do a lot if they are to affect their offspring strongly. Weak effects are simply not admitted by people today.

As a rule, if a child is born with water on the brain, one does not investigate whether or not, on the night conception occurred, the mother was at a dinner party where she drank red wine. If that were done, it would often be found to be the case, because wine causes an inclination toward heaviness, so that the child is born with hydrocephalus. If, however, the baby has a congenital twitch in a facial muscle, one normally does not check to find out if the father had perhaps been drinking too much the evening conception occurred. Seemingly insignificant matters are not investigated; people therefore assume that they have no effect. Actually, alcohol always has an effect. The really disastrous effects, however, occur with habitual drinkers. Here, too, a striking, a very remarkable thing can be noted.

You see, the children of a father who drinks can develop a weakness somewhere in their nervous systems and thus have a tendency toward tuberculosis, for example. What is inherited by the children need not be connected with the effects felt by the alcoholic father. The children need not have a tendency toward mental confusion, for example, but instead, toward tuberculosis, stomach ailments, and the like. This is what is so insidious about the effects of alcohol, that they are communicated to totally different organs in the human being.

In these matters, the great effect on human development of minute amounts of substances must always be taken into consideration. Not only that, but in each instance, one must consider how these substances are introduced into the human being. Consider the following example. Our bones contain a certain amount of calcium phosphate. Our brain also contains some phosphorus, and you will recall from earlier lectures that phosphorus is most useful since without phosphorus the brain actually could not be used for thinking. We therefore have phosphorus in us. I have already told you that phosphorus has a beneficial effect when the proper amount is consumed in food so that it is digested at a normal rate. If too large an amount of phosphorus is introduced too quickly into the human stomach, it is not useful but rather harmful.

Something else must also be considered, however. You know that in earlier days, matches were made with heads of phosphorus, but they are rarely seen anymore. If one has had an opportunity to observe something like what I did as a boy, the following can be experienced. When I was thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen years old, I had an hour's walk from our home to school every day. There was a match factory about halfway where phosphorus matches were manufactured by workmen. At any time, one could see that a number of these workmen had corroded jaws—this was in the 1870s—and, radiating out from the jaw, their bodies were gradually destroyed. Beginning with the upper and lower jaws—especially the upper—the bones were eaten away.

Knowing the harmful effect that phosphorus can have on humans, one realizes that such a match factory is actually about the most murderous place one can have. In matters pertaining to the progress of human civilization, it is always necessary to look at the numerous harmful effects that man can suffer in this way. I always saw a number of these workmen going into this match factory with bandaged jaws. That is where it started, and then it spread. Of course, phosphorus obviously was already contained in the upper jawbone, but what kind of phosphorus was it?

You see, the phosphorus that first enters the stomach along with food and then travels internally through the body into the jaws is not harmful, provided the amount is not too large. Matches, however, are manufactured first by cutting long wooden strips into tiny sticks; these are then fitted into frames so that one end sticks out. They are dipped first into a sulphur solution and then into a phosphorus solution. The workman who dipped the matches simply held the frame in his hand and always got splattered. Just think how often in a day a person who cannot wash his splattered hands might touch his face during working hours. Though the amounts of phosphorus with which the person comes in contact in this way are minute, they nevertheless penetrate his skin. This is a mystery of human nature: a substance that is often extraordinarily useful when taken internally and assimilated first through the body can have the most poisonous effect when it comes in contact with the body from outside. The human organism is so wisely arranged inwardly that an overdose of phosphorus is eliminated in the urine or feces; only the small amount required is allowed to penetrate the bones; the rest is eliminated.

There are, however, no provisions for the elimination of externally absorbed influences. This problem could, of course, have been alleviated. Remember that in the last century little thought was given to humanitarian considerations. It would have helped if bathing facilities had been made available so that every workman could have had a hot bath before leaving work. A great deal could naturally have been accomplished by such an arrangement, but it simply was not done.

I only mention this to you to illustrate how the human body works. Minute, detrimental influences from outside, even substances that the body otherwise needs to sustain itself, can undermine human health, indeed, can undermine generally the entire organization of the human being.

Man can withstand a good deal, but beyond a certain point the organism fails. In the case of drinking alcohol, the organism fails at the point at which alcohol prevents the correct functioning of the life-sustaining activities, the invisible life-sustaining activities.

When a person is exposed to phosphorus poisoning, the inner activity that otherwise would assimilate phosphorus is undermined. It is undermined from outside. It is actually quite similar in the case of alcohol. When a person drinks too much alcohol, drinking always more and more, so that imbibing alcohol is no longer merely acute but has become chronic, the alcohol works directly as alcohol in the human being. What is the direct effect of alcohol? Remember that I once told you that man himself produced the amount of alcohol he requires. I told you that in the substances contained in the intestines, a certain amount of alcohol is constantly produced by ordinary food simply because man needs this small amount of alcohol. What do we need it for? Remember that in an anatomy, lab specimens are preserved in alcohol, because otherwise they would decompose. The alcohol prevents what was a living body from decaying. The alcohol produced in the human being works in the same way in the human organism; that is, it prevents decay of certain substances needed by man. Man through his inner organization really prescribes how much alcohol he should have, because he has certain substances that would otherwise decay and must be conserved.

Take now the case of a person who drinks too much alcohol. Substances that should be eliminated are retained in the body; too much is preserved. If a person repeatedly exposes blood that circulates in the body to alcohol, he conserves this blood in his body. What is the consequence? This blood, having a counteracting influence, blocks the canals in the bones; it is not eliminated quickly enough through the pores and so forth. It remains too long in the body. The marrow in the hollows of the bone is consequently stimulated too little to make new blood, and it becomes weak. It so happens that, in the so-called chronic alcoholic, the bone marrow in time becomes weakened and no longer produces either the proper red corpuscles in the woman nor the proper white corpuscles in the man.

Now, at a point such as this, I always have to make the following observation. Certainly, it is very nice when people come up with social reforms such as the prohibition of alcohol and so forth. It certainly sounds fine. But even such a learned man as Professor Benedict—I told you about his collection of skulls of criminals and how Hungarian convicts objected to having their skulls sent to Vienna because they would be missing from the rest of their bones on Judgment Day—even Professor Benedict said, and rightly so, “Here people speak against alcohol, but many more have perished from water than from alcohol.” Generally, that is quite correct, because water, if it is contaminated, can be present in much larger quantities. Considered simply from a statistical point of view one can naturally say that many more people have died from water than from alcohol.

Something else must be taken into consideration, however. I would like to put it like this. The situation with alcohol is like the story contained in Heinrich Seidel's Leberecht Hühnchen. I don't know whether you are familiar with it, but it is the tale of a poor wretch, a poor devil who only has enough money to buy one egg. He also has a great imagination, however, and so he thinks, “If this egg had not been sold in the store but instead had been allowed to hatch, a hen would have developed from it. Now, when I eat this egg, I am actually eating a whole hen.” And so he imagines, “Why, I, who have a whole hen to eat, am really a rich fellow!” But his imagination is not satisfied there, so he continues, “Yes, but the hen I am now eating could have laid any number of eggs from which hens again would hatch, and I am eating all these hens.” Finally, he calculates how many millions and millions of hens that would amount to, and he asks himself, “Shouldn't that be called gorging myself with food?”

You see, this is the case with alcohol, not in a funny sense as in this story but in all seriousness. Certainly, if you take the time from 1870 to 1880, and you investigate how many people died throughout the world from water and from alcohol, statistics would show that more people died from impure water. In those days, people died more frequently from typhoid fever and related illnesses than today, and typhoid can, in many instances, be traced to contamination of the water. So, in this way, gentlemen, it is easy to conclude that more people die from drinking water.

One must think differently, however. One must know that alcohol gradually penetrates the bone marrow and ruins the blood. By harming the offspring, all the descendants are thus harmed. If an alcoholic has three children, for example, these three are harmed only a little; their descendants, however, are significantly hurt. Alcohol has a long-term negative effect that manifests in many generations. Much of the weakness that exists in humanity today is simply due to ancestors who drank too much. One must indeed picture it like this: here is a man and a woman, the man drinks too much, and the bodies of their descendants are weakened. Now think for a moment what this implies in a hundred, and worse, in several hundred years! It serves no purpose to examine only a decade, say from 1870 to 1880, and to conclude that more people died from water than from alcohol. Much longer periods of time must be considered. This is something that people don't like to do nowadays, except in jest as did the author of Leberecht Hühnchen, who naturally was looking over a long span of time when picturing how to wallow in so much food.

If this matter is examined from the social viewpoint, consideration must go beyond what is nearest at hand. Now, it is my opinion that the use of alcohol can be prohibited, but when it is, strange phenomena appear. You know, for example, that in many parts of the world the sale of alcohol has been restricted or even completely prohibited. But I call your attention to another evil that has recently made its appearance in Europe, that is, the use of cocaine by people who wish to drug themselves. In comparison to what the use of cocaine will do, particularly in damage to the human reproductive forces, alcohol is benign! Those individuals who take cocaine do not hold cocaine responsible for the damage it does, but you can see from the external symptoms that its use is much worse than that of alcohol. When a person suffers from delirium tremens, it becomes manifest in a form of persecution complex. He sees mice everywhere that pursue him. A cocaine user, however, imagines snakes emerging everywhere from his body. First, such a person seeks an escape through cocaine, and for a while he feels good inside, because it brings about a feeling of sensual pleasure. When he has not had any cocaine for some time, however, and he looks at himself, he sees snakes emerge everywhere from his body. Then he runs to have another dose of cocaine so that the snakes will leave him alone for a while. The fear he has of these snakes is much greater than the fear of mice that is experienced by an alcoholic suffering from delirium tremens.

Certainly, one can prohibit this or that, but people then hit on something else, which, as a rule, is not better but much worse. I therefore believe that enlightening explanations, like the one we presented today regarding the effects of alcohol, for example, can be much more effective and will gradually bring human beings to refrain from alcohol on their own. This does not infringe on human freedom, but understanding causes a person to say to himself, “Why, this is shocking! I am harmed right into my bones!” This becomes effective as feeling, whereas laws work only on the intellect. The real truths, the real insights, are those that work all the way into feeling. It is therefore my conviction that we can arrive at an effective social reform—and in other spheres it is much the same—only if true enlightenment in the widest circles of people is made our concern.

This enlightenment, however, can come about only when there is something with which one can enlighten people. When a lecture is given nowadays on the detrimental effects of alcohol, these things are not presented as I have done today—though that should not be so difficult, because people know the facts. But they do not know how to think correctly about these facts that are familiar to them. The listeners come away from a lecture given by some dime-a-dozen professor, and they do not know quite what to make of it. If they are particularly good-natured, they might say, “Well, we don't have the background to comprehend everything he said. The educated gentleman knows it all. A simple person can't understand everything!” The fact is that the lecturer himself doesn't fully comprehend what he is talking about. If one has a science that really goes to the bottom of things and considers their foundations, however, it is possible to make it comprehensible even to simple people.

If science is so unreal today, it is because true humanness was excluded from it when it originated. An individual rises from lecturer to assistant professor [in German, “extraordinary professor”] to full professor. The students are in the habit of saying, “The full professor knows nothing extraordinary, and the assistant professor knows nothing fully.” [“Ein ordentlicher Professor Weiß nichts Außerordentliches, und ein außerordentlicher Professor, der weiß nichts Ordentliches.”] The students sense this in their feelings, gentlemen; the sorry state of affairs thus continues. Regarding social reforms, science essentially accomplishes nothing, whereas it could be effective in the most active way. A person who is sincerely concerned about social life therefore must emphasize again and again that dry laws on paper are much less important—though naturally they too are needed—but they are much less important than thorough enlightenment. The public needs this enlightenment; then we would have real progress.

Particularly facts like those that can be studied in the case of alcohol can be made comprehensible everywhere. One then arrives at what I always tell people. People come and ask, “Is it better not to drink alcohol, or is it better to drink it? Is it better to be a vegetarian or to eat meat?” I never tell anyone whether or not he should abstain from alcohol, or whether he should eat vegetables or meat. Instead, I explain how alcohol works. I simply describe how it works; then the person may decide to drink or not as he pleases. I do the same regarding vegetarian or meat diets. I simply say, this is how meat works and this is how plants work. The result is that a person can then decide for himself.

Above all else, science must have respect for human freedom, so that a person never has the feeling of being given orders or forbidden to do something. He is only told the facts. Once he knows how alcohol works, he will discover on his own what is right. This way we shall accomplish the most. We will come to the point where free human beings can choose their own directions. We must strive for this. Then only will we have real social reforms.

If I am here on Wednesday, we will be able to have the next lecture.

Dr. Steiner: Much knowledge is required really to answer a question like the one posed last time, and we have already considered it from a number of different angles. Because anything relating to reproduction of living beings must be thoroughly understood, I wish to make use of the time today to speak a bit more about this question from a completely different perspective.

There's something peculiar about a remark recently made by an American who came to the conclusion, based on statistics—a favorite innovation of our time that is increasingly pursued in America—that the people who acquire the greatest intelligence are always born in the winter months. Naturally, these statistics should not be taken to mean that a person born in the summer months would have to be stupid. The statistics refer only to the majority. In any case, this American made the statement that, according to statistics, those born between December and the middle of March grow up to be the smartest people.

Something is indicated here that is difficult to study in humans, because with human beings everything possible can interfere. It does indicate, however, that living beings in general—and man is first of all a living being—depend in a certain respect on the course of the year and its influence on them.

Statements like the one made by this American surprise people today only because they know far too little about the real processes of nature. Perhaps this American will meet the same fate as that of a certain professor who once measured human brains; he drew up statistics and found in every instance that women's brains are smaller than those of men. Since, in his opinion, a smaller brain indicates less intelligence, he concluded that all women have less intelligence than men—now he was a famous man! He became famous for finding that the brains of women are smaller than those of men. Now, sometimes autopsies are performed on famous people after death, just because they are famous, and this happened to the professor. His brain was removed, and it turned out that the brain of this man was much smaller than all the women's brains he had examined!

Similarly, if he were not embarrassed to make it known, it might turn out that this American was himself born in the summer. If he were born in the summer, one would have to say that according to his own theory he could not be too clever; therefore, his theory could not be particularly valuable. But you see, there is something behind all these matters after all, and this something can lead to the most significant issues when studied in the right way.

I wish to tell you something today that definitely pertains to the question posed by Mr. R. You see, the conditions relating to reproduction can actually be studied only in animals and plants, because in humans they depend on so many other factors that they cannot be studied properly. If you take what I told you the day before yesterday, that is, that humans, women as well as men, influence the egg cell or semen through drinking, you will see that this alone makes it impossible to study their reproduction correctly. Now, animals are rarely in the habit of getting drunk. In them, conditions thus remain much more pure, and one can study the matter more purely. The most important aspects of the problem are such that dissection of animals for the purpose of such study is quite unnecessary. Through dissection one really discovers the least of all. To begin with, I shall tell you something that is not based on dissection but on positive results that were obtained by men who did not work according to theories but with practical experience. What I will relate to you has to do especially with the beavers in Canada.

These beavers can be encountered around here only in zoos or, stuffed, in laboratories, and they actually appear to be rather clumsy. Such a beaver has a rather clumsy head and body, the front legs are quite thick, and the hind feet are webbed so he can swim. Its strangest feature is its tail, which looks almost like an instrument; it is quite flat and is, in fact, the beaver's most ingenious aspect. What he has behind him is his most ingenious tool. People who have observed beavers do not know at first what they use these tails for, and they have thought up all sorts of incorrect ways of explaining them.

The beaver is a most unusual animal. When one becomes acquainted with a beaver in his own habitat, it is found to be an extremely phlegmatic animal, something that is also evident in those in our zoos. It is so phlegmatic that one cannot really do anything with it. You can attack a beaver, grab for it, but it will not defend itself. The beaver itself will never attack no matter how much it is provoked. It is a completely phlegmatic creature.

These beavers live mainly in such areas as large swamps or short rivers, and they live in a most remarkable way. When spring arrives, a beaver looks for a spot near a lake or river, digs a burrow in the mud, and spends the entire summer living like a true recluse alone in this burrow. This beaver sits the whole summer in this reclusive summer dwelling like a phlegmatic monk passing the time in his summer house! It is only a hole that he digs in the earth, but he does it in total isolation.

When winter approaches—already when late fall comes—the beavers emerge from their burrows and congregate in groups of two to three hundred. They come in all their “phlegmatic-ness” (“Phlegmatischheit”) and form communities. Naturally, those that had mated earlier are among them. A female beaver had prepared her isolated home so that it was suitable for children; the male lived nearby in his own burrow. Now, all these families gather together.

In their slow, phlegmatic way, the beavers proceed to look for a suitable locality. Though it is sometimes difficult to observe because of their phlegmatic temperament, one group will prefer a lake, another a short river, which they follow downstream to a point that appears particularly suited to their purposes. After they have investigated the area, the whole group gathers together again. Near the lake or river, there are usually trees. It is really remarkable how these clumsy beavers now suddenly become extraordinarily skillful. They make use of their front feet—not their hind feet, which are webbed so they can swim—more cleverly than a man handles his tools. Using their front paws and sharp teeth, they gnaw branches off trees and even cut through tree trunks. Then, when a group of them has enough branches and felled trees, they drag them either into the lake they have chosen or into the river.

These animals then push the branches and trees in the lake to the selected spot. Those who have dragged their trees into the river know full well that the river itself will carry them. They only steer the branches so that they won't drift to the side. In this way, all the branches and trees are transported to the spot they have chosen either on the lake's shore or alongside the stream.

Having arrived there, those who have chosen a lake—having transported the trees to the shore—immediately begin constructing so-called lodges. The others, who have picked a river, do not begin with the building of lodges; they first proceed to construct a network of branches. These are interlaced with each other (sketching) until they form a proper network. When the beavers have built up such a wall, they add a second by fetching more branches, all of the same length; in this way, they make a wall two meters or more thick. Thus, you see, the animals dam up the river; the water must flow over it, and underneath it they have free space. Only now, having finished their dam, this wall, do they build their lodge into the wall so that the river flows over it.

When the beavers have accumulated enough branches, and their wall appears thick enough to them, they haul in other material such as ordinary chunks of earth. They fashion a kind of loam from it and putty up the dam on all sides. The beavers first erect a wall, just like real architects. Those who select the lake site, however, don't need a dam and therefore don't try to build one.

After this wall is built—in the case of those who choose the lake, it begins immediately—the beavers begin constructing little lodges from the same material. They look like clay barrels (sketching), but they are real little houses, constructed like braided mats. They are puttied up so well that the small amount of water that seeps into the space can do the beavers no harm. Such a beaver lodge is never constructed in a part of the stream where the water freezes. Imagine how ingenious this is! As you know, water only freezes on its surface; if one dives deep enough, one comes to still or flowing water, neither of which freezes at that depth. Precisely at the level where the water never freezes, these beavers build their dwellings.

Each of these lodges has two floors. There is a floor built in here (sketching), and below it is the entrance. The beavers can run up and down in the lodge; they live upstairs and keep their winter supplies downstairs. They haul in the food they need for the winter, and when it is all stored, the beaver family moves into this lodge, remaining always near the other families.

There the beaver families live until spring, when they once again move to their solitary dwellings. During the winter, the food supplies are brought up from the lower floor, and in this way the beavers sustain themselves. As I said, when summer comes, they seek out their solitary burrows, but during the winter they are together. They lead their social life in beaver villages on the bottom of lakes or in streams by the side of the dam they have so skillfully constructed.

From all that has been observed, even beavers in zoos work solely with their teeth and front paws, never with their tails. Although it is formed most ingeniously, the tail is never used for work. There are many descriptions that claim that beavers employ their tails in working on their constructions, but that is a delusion; it is simply not true. Beavers do possess especially well-developed front legs and teeth, and they use them more cleverly than a man uses his tools.

You know that natural history classifies the various animal species, and among the mammals are the beasts of prey, bats, the ruminants, and so forth. Among the mammals are also the so-called rodents. Our rats, for example, are rodents. The beaver's structure actually puts it in the rodent family.

In any book on natural history, you will find that the rodents are described as the most stupid of mammals; hence, the beaver as individual animal is reckoned among the least intelligent mammals. One can say that the beaver, when studied as a single animal, appears above all as a terribly phlegmatic little rascal. Its phlegmatic temperament is so great that it can appear about as clever as phlegmatic humans appear: they show no interest in anything. The beaver is therefore awfully stupid, but it also accomplishes all these extraordinarily clever feats! For beavers, then, one can say that Rosegger's saying concerning man does not apply: “One is a human being, two are folks, if there are more, they are dumb animals.”¹ Rosegger said this not about beavers but about human beings. He means that when many people meet together, they become stupid. There is something true in this. In a crowd, people become confused and do make stupid impressions, though there certainly are intelligent people among them!

We can say that the opposite is the case with beavers. One is stupid, but several are a little cleverer.² When two or three hundred gather together in the autumn, they become most clever, they become real architects. Though we humans do not tend to be particularly sensitive to the special beauty of the constructions of beavers, this is due to our human taste, but the beaver lodge is really as trim as the beaver is clumsy.

Now, much research can be done on why the beavers are so clever when they congregate. An important indication lies in the fact that the beavers begin their activity in the fall; by day, however, one sees little of this activity. The construction of such a dam and beaver village—it is really an entire village that they lay out—takes place very quickly and is often finished in a matter of days. They are seen doing little during the day, extraordinarily little, but they work feverishly at night. Thus, the beaver's cleverness is brought about first by winter and second by night. Here lie the real clues for the study of this whole matter.

When people study, however, the first principle should be to avoid too much speculative thinking. This might sound strange, but you will understand what I mean. Man does not become especially intelligent through speculation. As a rule, if he ponders over something that he has observed, nothing particularly clever will result. If one wishes to understand the phenomena of the world, therefore, one should not rely too much on speculation; one's speculation is not at all the important thing. Should the facts call for it, one should think, but one's main attention should not be directed toward brooding over something one has observed as a means of figuring it out. Instead, other facts should be looked at, compared with the problem at hand, and a connection sought between them. The more one connects various facts, the more one learns to recognize in nature. People who have only brooded over nature have really not discovered anything more weighty than what they knew in the first place.

When a person becomes a materialist, he speaks materialistically about nature, because that is what he is to begin with. He does not discover anything new. When a man speaks idealistically about nature, he does so because he is an idealist to begin with. In almost all instances, it can be proven that through speculation people discover only what is made evident through what they had already become. Correct thinking only results when one simply allows the facts to guide one.

Now I will add another group of facts to those concerning the beaver, facts that will lead you to the correct clues, not through speculation but simply through a comparison of the facts. I have already referred to the wasps and told you of an observation about wasps made by Darwin. Today, I would like to point this out again.

The wasps make ingenious nests for themselves. Though faintly resembling beehives, the walls of these wasps' nests do not consist of wax but of actual paper. Secondly, the whole process differs from that of the bees. There are wasps' nests, for example, that are built first by digging up the ground; then something resembling a pouch is made. It is constructed somewhat like a beaver lodge, but it is put together with tiny twigs or whatever wood the wasps can find, which they work and shape in the right way so that they end up with a covering, a pouch-like covering that is somewhat thick. It is in this that they build their little nest. There they build their different floors. The cells are hexagonal, just like the bee's honeycomb, and are enveloped by a paper covering. They are like the floors in a building, and there are sometimes many of them, one above the other.

Everything inside the nest is fashioned of paper. The pouch-like outer covering, however, is not made of paper but of other materials, that is, of tiny twigs or bits of wood that are first split before being used. All this is woven into a network and then puttied up. That is what the outer covering consists of, and it is either built in a hole in the ground or fastened with putty to something up in the air. Within the pouch are the individual cells, into each of which an egg will be laid.

This is the story, then, with wasps. You can imagine that wasps are extraordinarily susceptible to the weather. Only some of one year's wasps survive until the following spring, but it doesn't matter if the others don't survive as long as one or two females from a nest remain. In winter they seek out a sheltered little nook where they as females can live scantily, and they hibernate there. In spring, these females emerge from their hiding places and are ready to lay their eggs. Interestingly enough, a special variety of wasps hatches from all these eggs in spring. These wasps that are hatched in spring, growing very quickly and not yet having cells, proceed immediately to construct such cells. Flying around in whole swarms, they look everywhere for materials with which to build a nest properly. This work continues all summer long. These wasps construct the cells there.

The wasps that hatch from eggs laid in spring have a specific characteristic; that is, they are all sterile and cannot reproduce. With these wasps there is no reproduction. Their reproductive organs are so stunted that reproduction is out of the question. So, the first thing the wasp does in spring is to produce an army of workers for itself that are sexless and terrible drudges; they toil throughout the summer.

I have known natural scientists who considered it a goal worth striving for to manipulate humans so as to produce sexless individuals. They would not have families and would only toil, leaving reproduction to a select few as with the wasps.

Well, the fact is that the sexless wasps toil away all summer. When summer is over, the female begins to lay eggs that produce males and females. As a rule, it is the same female that laid the sexless eggs earlier. Now she lays eggs from which, in autumn, males and females emerge.

The males develop into rather puny creatures. By comparison, the sexless wasps are quite robust workers. The males turn out to be stunted and cannot do much of anything. They have just enough time to feed for a while, mate, and then die. Truly, these male wasps play a rather sorry role. They are hastily hatched in fall, they must feed a little, and then they impregnate the females; after that, having accomplished their goal, they die. That is the last thing they do.

Among some types of wasps, the males are a bit hardier. Here things are really curious. Though it is only an exception, it resembles the behavior of certain spiders. With certain spiders, something remarkable is the case. You see, the female spiders consider the males good for nothing but fertilizing them. The males are permitted to approach the females only when they are ready for fertilization, never before. Before, the females generally don't permit the males to come near them; first they must be mature enough for the fertilization. Now, as I said, the following also occurs occasionally, as an exception, among wasps. Among spiders, which are, after all, lower creatures, when a female notices a greedy little male approaching, she places herself in a spot that is not easily accessible to him and even more difficult for him to leave. There the female waits for him, lets fertilization occur, and then lets him try to leave. When he comes up against an obstacle, the female quickly pursues him and bites him until he's dead. Here, the female spider herself sees to it that the male dies. Such is the case with some spiders. Just imagine, when the male has carried out his function, he must be killed, because he no longer serves a purpose.

Among wasps, however, the males die as a rule by themselves, because they have expended so much energy during their mating activity that they have no strength left and so perish. The sexless wasps die at the same time. After toiling all summer, they all die in the fall. The sexless and the male wasps die, and only the females remain. Of these, many also succumb to the cold of winter. Only those few survive that have found a secure shelter. They make it through to spring, lay eggs, and the whole cycle starts anew. So, in spring and summer only sexless wasps are born. Not until late fall, approaching winter, can the sexually active wasps be born.

These are the facts, you see, that must be observed. It is very important to connect these with other facts, since this shows us how much the sex life of animals is connected with the seasons of the year. The sex life of animals is very strongly connected with the course of the year.

Let us assume that it is summer. The earth is extraordinarily exposed to the sun's effects. The sun sends down light and warmth to the earth. Direct exposure to sunlight causes one to sweat; one notices the sun's effects by one's own condition. Neither the beaver nor the female wasp expose themselves directly to sunlight; they are always in some cave-like dwelling. In their holes they benefit from the sun's light and heat only indirectly through the earth. Thereby, as winter approaches they receive quite definite qualities. Just think, toward winter the wasps receive a quality that makes them capable of producing sexually active offspring.

What does this signify? The female wasp is exposed throughout the summer to the sun's heat and light and produces sexless wasps. You can therefore say that the effects of the sun are such that they actually destroy the sexuality of the wasps. It is quite obvious from this fact that the sun with its light and heat, which are reflected by the earth, has the effect of destroying the reproductive tendencies. This is why, when spring comes and warmth and sunlight prevail, the wasps produce sexless offspring. Only when winter approaches, when therefore the sun's heat and light no longer have the same intensity, do the wasps gain the strength to produce offspring with reproductive organs. This clearly demonstrates that the seasons of the year have a definite influence.

Now, if we turn from the wasps to the beavers, we must say to ourselves, the beaver is an extremely stupid, phlegmatic animal! It is stupid and phlegmatic to the highest degree. Wonderful. But where does it spend the summer? It stays in the ground in its solitary burrow, allowing heat and light that comes into the burrow to penetrate its body, so that it actually absorbs all the summer sunlight and warmth. When this absorption is completed in the fall, the beaver begins to look for other beavers, and together they become clever. It employs a cleverness that it does not possess as a single animal. Now, suddenly, as they gather together, the beavers become clever. Naturally, as single animals they could never construct all those beaver villages. The first step of choosing a suitable site is already clever.

This clearly illustrates what I pointed out last time: the cleverness that is in a creature must first be gathered, just as water is collected in pitchers. What does the beaver do while as a single animal it lives like a hermit in its summer house? The beaver gathers sunlight and the sun's warmth for itself—or so we say, because all we can perceive is the sun's light and warmth. In truth, the beaver gathers its intelligence. Along with sunlight and warmth, intelligence streams from the cosmos down upon the earth, and the beaver gathers it for itself; now the beaver has it, and it builds. With the beaver you can see in reality what I recently presented to you as a picture.

Something else now becomes comprehensible: the beaver's tail. Compare it with what I said about the dog's tail, the dog's tail being its organ of pleasure and therefore the soul organ of the dog. The dog wags its tail when it is happy. In the beaver's case it is so that within its tail, which the animal does not use as a tool but which is formed most ingeniously, the beaver has its accumulated intelligence. With it the animal directs itself. This means that the beaver is really directed by the sun's warmth and light. They are contained in the tail and have become intelligence. This is really the communal brain of this beaver colony.

These tails are the means by which the sunlight and warmth produce cleverness. The beaver does not employ its tail as a physical instrument; it uses its front paws and teeth as physical instruments. The tail, however, is something that has an effect; it has an effect just as when a group is being driven forward by somebody from behind. In that case, it is somebody driving them. Here it is the sun, which, through the beavers' tails, still has an aftereffect in winter and constructs the beaver village. It is the intelligence that comes down from the sun to the earth with light and warmth that does the building.

Naturally, what descends here as soul and spirit from the universe affects all the other creatures, including the wasps. How does it affect the wasps? When the female is exposed to the sun—meaning the sun's earthly effect, which it enjoys in its earthen hole—the force in the wasp's offspring that can bring forth more offspring is destroyed. The wasp can produce only sexless insects under the sun's influence. Only when the wasp is not so strongly exposed to the sun's heat, in autumn, and is still full of vitality—not subdued as in winter—does the force develop in it to bring forth sexually active wasps. This once again demonstrates plainly that what comes from the earth produces the sexual forces, whereas that which comes from the universe produces intelligence and kills the sexual forces. In this way a balance is brought about. When the wasp is more exposed to the earth, it develops sexual forces; when the wasp is exposed more to heaven—if I may use this word here—it does not develop sexual forces but produces sexless wasps instead. These sexless insects have in themselves the cleverness to construct a whole wasps' nest. Who, in fact, builds this nest? The sun builds it through the sexless wasps!

This is a most important point, gentlemen. In truth, the wasps' nests, as well as all the beavers' construction, are built by the cleverness that flows to earth from the sun. This is plain to see when all the facts are brought together. That is why I said to you that all speculation indulged in after something has been observed doesn't do a bit of good. Only when facts are compared and related to each other is a sound opinion gained.

People simply look at the isolated facts; this is why there is so much that is not to the point. They think to themselves, “Now, when one observes beavers, one observes beavers, and afterward one speculates about beavers. When one observes beavers, what does one care about wasps?” But one discovers nothing if one fails to observe something that is seemingly so far removed from the beaver as the wasp. If one were to look at the wasp, one would see that wasps' nests are also constructed through the cleverness that comes to us from the sun.

The sun's effects can still be observed in a tame beaver in a cage, although the animal need not be tame, because it is so phlegmatic, but needs only to be in captivity. When the sun's effects cease to be so strong and instead the earth influences it, even the caged beaver begins its winter activities. It tries to bite through the wires of its cage. This is said to be the beaver's instinct. Anybody can say “instinct”; that is just a word. Such words are like empty containers into which everything is poured that one knows nothing about. If one wishes to explain something like instinct, however, one reaches the point where one must say: it is indeed the sun! Gentlemen, it really is so. In this manner, through the pure facts, one comes to recognize how the cosmic surroundings of the earth affect living beings.

Now it is no longer so surprising that some American comes to say that those humans born in the months from December to March most readily acquire intelligence. In the case of human beings, matters have become quite complicated. Everything in man tends toward his becoming independent from all that animals are still dependent upon. You must therefore consider the following. Persons born between December and March were conceived between March and May. Their births date back to conceptions that took place in the spring nine months earlier, between March and May, and hence to a time approaching summer. According to everything I have explained today, the sun's effects are always stronger then. So, what does the sun do? It subdues human sexual forces just a little—not completely, because man is more independent than the animals—and these subdued sexual forces become forces of intelligence. That is why such a person has an easier time of it, while those born in summer must work somewhat more at acquiring their cleverness. That can happen, but it is true that humans have different predispositions. Those conceived in spring and born the following winter tend to acquire forces of intelligence more easily than those born at other times.

All this must be known so that these differences can be compensated for through education. In man, this can be done. Wasps, however, cannot be educated to produce sexless offspring that build nests in winter, nor can beavers be educated to overcome nature, as we say, to a certain degree. You can see from this that to overcome something is different for man from what it is for animals. In the animals, the soul-spiritual element depends completely on cosmic development. It simply depends on the sun for wasps' nests and beaver lodges to be built.

Something else can be seen in the beaver. In fall, these beaver hermits that have spent the entire summer in seclusion come together in groups of two and three hundred, and only then, as groups, can they employ the intelligence bestowed by the sun. They can use it as groups, not individuals. Individually, they could never accomplish this; it must be the work of the group.

With human beings much can be accomplished by the individual that animals can only accomplish in groups. This is why in anthroposophy we say that with animals the soul life exists only in groups—hence, group souls. Man, however, has his individual soul.

Now, this is most interesting. I once told you what the human thigh bone looks like, for example. In the beaver, it really is not the same, but a human thigh bone looks like an extraordinarily delicate, beautiful work of art. In it there are beams, quite ingeniously constructed. A human being is actually built up in such a way that, when observing him correctly, one can say: he builds everything in himself that the beaver builds outwardly. By nature, he builds everything in himself that the beaver builds outwardly. The question then arises: where does all that is so wisely and ingeniously constructed within a human being originate? If the beaver construction originates from the sun and its surroundings, the human organization also originates from the sun. We are, indeed, not earthly beings but sun beings and have only been placed on the earth. What for? You can see when you consider this matter.

From the earth the wasps have the power to produce sexual offspring. Man must be on the earth in order to have his reproductive force. By comparison, he has another force that is more rational, which he gets from the cosmic surroundings. We can see quite clearly that man gets his intelligence from the cosmic surroundings, and the reproductive force he gets from the earth. One could go further and show how the moon is related to the earth, but there is no more time today. We can go into that another time. You can see, however, that if facts are viewed correctly they lead you to realize that the world is really a unity and that we are dependent also upon the earth's surroundings, which consist not merely of a shining, warming sun but also of a clever sun, an intelligent sun. This is extremely important, because the individual questions that you pose can be answered better in this way. You see that the reproductive force, which I described to you last time, is related to drinking. Why are they related in such a way that a little drinking does not make such a difference but heavy drinking does? You can figure this out from the following.

What is alcohol? Wine demonstrates what alcohol actually is, because wine, which only wealthy people can afford to drink, has the most harmful effect. Beer is less harmful for the reproductive organs than wine. Beer affects other organs more—the heart, kidneys, and so forth—but the alcohol in wine and, of course, especially the alcohol in hard liquor, affects the reproductive organs.

Where does the substance contained in wine and hard liquor originate? It originates through the influence of the sun's forces! This substance needs the whole summer to mature. Now you can see why it becomes harmful to the reproductive organs. When one drinks, the reproductive organs are subjected to what has been absorbed inwardly in the way food is, to what should be absorbed solely by way of the sun itself, the sun's shining. This takes its toll. Man drinks something that the sun produces outside of him. It becomes a poison through this. When the warmth of the sun is taken into the system in the right way, however, the organism itself produces the small quantity of alcohol it. needs, as I have explained. In drinking alcohol, man really admits an enemy into his system, because what is introduced in the right way from outside turns into a poison when it is consumed inwardly, and vice versa. I have demonstrated this to you in the case of phosphorus. So, what works in alcohol is what the sun has produced in it, because the sun has matured it. When the sun shines on us, it is the other way around; then we must absorb warmth and light from outside. When we consume alcohol, however, we warm ourselves inwardly. The same force that is our friend when we make use of it outwardly becomes our enemy when we use it internally.

The same is also true in nature. There are forces in nature that work beneficially from one direction, but when they work from the opposite direction they work as poisons. We can gain comprehension only when we examine this in the right way.

I wanted to add this so that you could understand better everything that relates to Mr. E's question. Now think all this over. Should you wish to ask further questions, I hope to be here next Saturday.

• 1. Note by translator: In the German text, this saying by the Austrian poet, Peter Rosegger, is rendered in untranslatable Austrian dialect: “Oaner is a Mensch, zwoa san Leit, san's mehra, san's Viecher.”
• 2. Here Rudolf Steiner mimics the same Austrian dialect and says, “Oaner is dumm, und mehra san a bissel gescheiter.”