The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Question: A listener has brought stones back from his vacation. The question is whether stones also have life or have once had life and how they came into being.

Dr. Steiner: I may be able to take up these stones again at a later date; but perhaps it is also possible that I can still incorporate it into our present consideration.

Look, gentlemen, I will say the following: We have seen that there is actually a kind of killing of life within us, in the human being. We have seen that we have these little creatures crawling around in our blood, the white blood corpuscles, which creep through the blood vessels to our skin. I told you that it is a special delicacy for these little creatures when they come to the surface, whereas they are otherwise only inside the human body. This is, so to speak, the spice of life for them. So these are the living cells that crawl around. In contrast to this, I told you: the cells in the nervous system, namely those in the brain, are actually cells that are continually being killed, continually entering into the dead. The cells in the brain are such that they actually only begin to be somewhat more alive when you are sleeping. They start to be a little more alive. They cannot move away from their place because they are very cramped among the others; they cannot move like the white blood cells, but they start to live a little during the night while you sleep. And that is why, when these cells get a little more life and willpower from the body, the white blood cells have to stay a little calmer. And that is why, as I have told you, thoughts actually arise in the whole body.

Now let us pose the question: Where do thoughts actually come from? — Not true, the people who just want to think materialistically, that is, comfortably, they say: Well, thoughts just arise in the brain or in the nervous system of the human being. Thoughts grow there like cabbages in the field. — But if only people would think it through — “like cabbages in the field”! Cabbages don't grow in the field unless they are planted. So, things have to be planted first, so to speak. For my part, everyone can see a kind of field in the human brain for thoughts. But just imagine: if you have a beautiful field of cabbages, and the person who has always cultivated it were to move away and no one were to be found to continue the work, then no cabbage would ever grow in that field.

So it must be said: Just when one thinks that thoughts come out of the brain, one must first ask: Where do they come from? Well, just as the cabbage comes out of the field! - So the question must first be properly understood. And then we have to ask ourselves the following: What you see here has actually come into being out there in nature. I would like to explain to you how what comes into being out there in nature. I have said: We find everything in man when we understand everything in man's surroundings. When we looked at the plants and so on, we understood many things in man. Now we have this stone. Let's take a good look at this rock. You see, it is a very soft rock underneath and behind and above. You can scrape it off with a knife. The outer part, what is around it, is just a bit denser earth. So it is like this – I just want to draw the bottom here –: there is this soft rock at the bottom, and just as if they were growing out of it, there are all kinds of crystals on this soft rock, crystals that look like they are growing out of it. I would have to draw many, wouldn't I, but this is enough. There are such small crystals; they are down there, as if they had grown out, but they are terribly hard. You can't scrape them off with a knife; the knife doesn't affect them; at most, if you can get at one, you can cut it off as a whole, but you can't scratch into it. So these are hard crystals that are embedded there.

Now let us ask ourselves: How do such crystals get into the softer soil, which is only a little compacted? Such crystals are bodies that are very beautifully designed; they have such a longitudinal shape, and at the top they have a small roof on them. There would also be a roof at the bottom if it did not extend into the earth. If the earth were soft enough, this would be the case with every crystal; but it perishes when it enters the earth.

Where do these crystals come from? When plants grow, carbonic acid must be outside the plants. Otherwise the plants cannot grow. The same substance that we exhale must reach the plants. And then, when the carbonic acid reaches the plants, the plants absorb this carbonic acid, retain the carbon that is in the carbonic acid, and they exhale the oxygen. That is the difference between humans and plants. Humans inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide; we retain the oxygen while we release the carbon dioxide. The plant is connected to the earth. When the plant dies, this carbon returns to the soil and becomes the black coal that we dig out of the earth after centuries.

But there are also other substances. There is a substance that is quite similar to coal in a certain respect, but is different in other ways. This is silica. Suppose you have a soil that is rich in silica, with a lot of silica in it. Then, because oxygen is always present, oxygen takes effect. There is oxygen above it now. This oxygen does not initially affect the silica. But after some time, in the course of the development of the earth, you suddenly find that the oxygen has combined with the pebble. And just as we produce carbon dioxide when we breathe out, when the pebble from the earth properly combines with the oxygen, quartz, silicic acid is formed; crystals like these are formed. It only needs the pebble to combine with oxygen from the earth, and crystals such as those that are there are formed.

But oxygen does not have the power to combine with silica on its own. You can have as much silica as you like, and oxygen on top of it, it would not all form. Why do these beautiful shapes form? Yes, they form precisely because forces are at work in the universe from all sides and the earth is constantly in connection with the whole universe. Forces are constantly coming in from all sides, and these forces bring oxygen into the pebble, and that is how such crystals are formed. So all these crystals are formed because the earth is influenced by all the other stars. We can therefore say that these crystals are actually formed from the world.

Now, however, you can say the following: What are you telling us? The rock that the pea-flour has given us proves the opposite! — The rock is actually like this: there is loose earth below (see drawing), above it is more loose earth, and behind it is more loose earth. It is completely surrounded by loose earth, and these crystal forms here, they are not just growing upwards from below, as I have described them now, but you could say that they are already growing upwards if only they were there from below. But these are now those that grow towards us from above. Now you might say: But that cannot be explained from the universe, because then one would have to assume that the same forces come from the interior of the earth, which would then have to come from the universe if one were to explain them only from bottom to top.

Yes, you see, that is an apparent contradiction. There must be something behind it. Now I will tell you what is behind it.

Such rocks do not form on the open ground; they form in the mountains. And if it is on the open ground, it is also the case that there are layers of earth above and below, just as there are in the mountains. But let's assume we get it out of the mountains. Imagine we have such a mountain range, and I want to draw the slope of the mountain range. If you now go up there (see drawing), you go up like this, and of course you have to go past there, the path has to go there, the earth or the rock can overhang a little; you will find overhanging earth everywhere if you go into the mountains. Now imagine that a very, very long time ago, what I have drawn here in brown would have been there, would have been deposited there, and that would have been deposited there (see drawing). According to my explanation, crystals would have formed here through the forces of the universe, as I have explained, and therefore also such crystals. Crystals would have grown down there, as it were, through the forces of the universe, and up there too.

Then it later happened that what was up there fell down and covered it. So you see: When the upper falls down, it falls in such a way that it is then at the top (see drawing), and at the bottom are the crystals that originally went up, and because of the fall they fell over them so that they were held by those that were at the bottom and were thus superimposed on each other. Those who fell down lay on top of those below, so that what was at the top came to be at the bottom.

This is how it was in the mountains all the time. Those who study will find that landslides like this have occurred continuously in the mountains, where the upper layer has been laid on top of the lower layer. That is precisely what is interesting about studying mountains. When you walk in the plains, you get the feeling that one layer has been laid on top of the other throughout history, because it has only happened in the last few millennia. We could never say that about the Alps. The Alps were also formed in this way a long time ago; but then the higher parts plunged over the lower parts, and the Alps are completely jumbled layers of earth.

That is why it is so difficult to study the Alps, because you have to consider everywhere whether what is above has also originated in this way. Often it did not come about that way, but rather that there was a layer down there, a layer up there, and then something was pushed up, knocking over what was below; and it covered what was below. And so these folds, as they are called, have formed in the mountains over the course of millennia and millennia, bringing about such things. So that one must first explain these things by the fact that the mountains have thrown themselves over each other again. So one would have to say: the lower part was formed on such a slope (see drawing), the upper part on such a slope, and behind it there was of course the mountain range, so that it fell over it; it was laid over it. So that one can only explain such a thing, where crystals face each other from below and from above, if one knows that on Earth, over the course of millennia, everything has gradually been mixed up.

So in the whole inanimate realm we always have forces that come from the universe and that also work in us in such a way that we actually have to do something in us to prevent these forces from disturbing us.

You see, gentlemen, the pebble that is common in the earth is also found in us. It is not too much, but we have such substances in us, from which such terribly hard stones can arise. But if such hard rocks were to arise in us, as Mr. Erbsmehl has brought here, then we would be in a bad way! If, for example, a child who already has pebbles inside could not help it and such crystals, even if they were very small, would form everywhere (they would be tiny after all), that would be a very bad thing! They sometimes form during an illness.

Sugar can also form crystals, as you know. If you look at rock sugar, it also consists of crystals that are layered on top of each other. Now, we have a lot of sugar in us. Not everyone on earth eats the same amount of sugar. That varies. For example, people in Russia eat very little sugar, while in England they eat a lot of sugar – on average, of course. But then people also differ again. The Russian character is different from the English character. The Russians are very different people from the English. This is largely due to the fact that the Russians get little sugar in their food. The English eat things that contain a lot of sugar, foods that contain a lot of sugar.

This is connected with what I have already said. The forces of the universe are at work in everything. So man has a lot of sugar in him. Sugar always wants to become crystal. What can we do to prevent it from becoming crystal?

You see, I told you that there is a lot of water in us, living water: that dissolves the sugar. That would be a nice story if the water didn't keep dissolving the sugar! Such small crystals would form, like rock candy crystals, and we would have such small stuffy crystals inside us if the sugar were not constantly being dissolved. We humans need sugar in our food, but we can only use it if we dissolve it continuously. We have to have it. Why do we have to have it? Because we have to do this, to dissolve it! We don't live on it alone, but it is part of our life that we dissolve the sugar. So we have to get it into us.

But if we now have too little strength to dissolve this sugar, then these very small crystals form, and then they leave with the urine. And that's when diabetes comes. And that is the explanation for why people become diabetic: they have too little strength to dissolve the sugar they eat. They have to get sugar, but if they have too little strength to dissolve the sugar, diabetes occurs. The sugar must not get so far that it comes off in small crystals, but it must be dissolved. Man must have the strength to dissolve the sugar. That is his life.

If you think about something like that, you can also see from it that we not only have to have the strength to dissolve the sugar, but we also have to have the strength to continually dissolve these small crystals that always want to form in us as quartz crystals – there are few of them, but they want to form, these quartz crystals. They must not be allowed to form in us. If they were to form in a child, the child would come and say: It's terrible, it stings me everywhere! It stings everywhere!

What has happened if it stings the child everywhere? Yes, you see, there are the small pebble crystals that have arisen in the nerves, have not been resolved. They have remained lying. You must not imagine that these are huge masses. There are very few, tiny ones that you can not even find easily with a microscope; much smaller than one ten thousandth of a millimeter. When many tiny crystals have accumulated in the nervous system, then the person gets tiny pricks everywhere that they cannot explain. It stings them everywhere. And in addition, small inflammations are caused by this happening; very small inflammations are caused. And then the person has rheumatism or gout. Gout is nothing more than such tiny crystals settling. These pains that a person has come from this. And that a person with gout gets the gouty lumps comes from the inflammation. When you push a nail into yourself, an inflammation occurs. These little skewers come from within, pushing to the surface. There are small internal inflammations, and then these inflammations form these gouty lumps.

These are all processes that can take place inside a person. But from this you can see that we must always have forces within us that, let's say, have to work against gout, otherwise we as human beings would constantly get gout. But we must not get it all the time. So there must always be something behind it that we can work against.

What does that mean? Yes, you see, it means that forces are at work from the universe. They actually do not want to form too large, but microscopically tiny crystals in us. When these forces come in and form these crystals here, they also work in us, so that we are constantly permeated by these forces, and we have to develop those forces in our inner being that constantly bring this matter into nothingness. We must continually work against these forces. We must therefore have forces within us that work against these forces. These forces of the universe also enter into us; but we work against them – and particularly strongly in the nerves. If we did not work against them, mineral substances would continually arise in the nerves.

These mineral substances must arise because, you see, there are children who remain stupid and die young. If you then dissect such children who have remained stupid, you often find that they have too little of what is called cerebral sand. Everyone must have a little cerebral sand in them. This cerebral sand must arise and must be dissolved again and again.

But if we have too little strength to dissolve it, too much can remain. But, gentlemen, if you get the food into your blood, the sand will continually settle in your brain, because that is what you are constantly doing in your brain. It is continually being deposited. And the cerebral sand that is in there (it is drawn) is exposed to the forces of the universe just as much as what is outside in nature, so that tiny crystals are constantly trying to form in there. But they must not form. If we don't have cerebral sand, we become stupid. If the crystals were to form, we would constantly faint because we would effectively suffer from cerebral rheumatism or cerebral gout. Because otherwise the body just hurts; but if the brain contains these crystals, there is nothing you can do but faint. So you need brain sand, but you have to keep dissolving it. It is a continuous process of brain sand being deposited, dissolved, deposited, dissolved.

If too much is deposited, it can sometimes also damage the walls of the blood vessels in the brain. Then the blood comes out. Then there is the stroke, not just the fainting, but the stroke, the cerebral hemorrhage.

So when you study the disease process, you can see what a person actually has inside them. Because in illness, everything in us that is in a healthy person is just too strong. Being sick means nothing more than that we develop something too strongly.

This also happens in life, gentlemen. You have already seen that when a small child is there and you touch its cheek gently with your hand, it is a caress, you stroke it. And you can also make the same touch with your hand too strong; then it is no longer a caress, then it is a slap.

Well, you see, that's the way it is in the world. Things that can be a caress on one side can be a slap in the face on the other. And so in life, what has to be done in the brain, this gentle work in the brain sand, becomes a slap in the face when it becomes too strong, when the power in us is too weak, so that we cannot dissolve this mineral that we have within us. Then we would constantly faint or if it becomes too strong, when these crystals keep piercing our blood vessels, we would have a stroke. So these crystals must be continually dissolved by us. This thing that I have now told you is constantly going on in you.

I will now tell you something else. Let us make things very clear. Suppose you have the human being here – I will draw it very schematically – here is his brain, here is his eye, and here I will draw something that you are somehow looking at, so let us say there is a plant in front of your eye for the sake of argument.

Now turn your attention to this plant. See, when you turn your attention to this plant – you can only do this, of course, when it is daylight all around – and the plant is illuminated by the sun's rays, then it is bright, and you receive the light effect in your eye. But through the optic nerve, which goes backwards from the eye, what is the light effect goes into your brain. So when you look at a plant, you are directed towards the plant through your eye, and from the plant the light effect goes through your eye into your brain.

This secretion, you have to imagine it as a completely human process. You will have noticed that you not only sweat when you exert yourself, but also when, for example, you are terribly afraid of something. You do not exactly secrete brain sand, but other salts, and with that water through your skin. That is secretion. But looking means constantly secreting brain sand. When someone looks very intently at something, brain sand is constantly being secreted. And that is where we have to dissolve this brain sand. Because if we did not dissolve this brain sand again, then a tiny little flower would arise in us from the brain sand in the brain! To look at the flower, that actually means that a very small, tiny flower forms in us from the brain sand, which is then only directed from top to bottom, just as the little picture in the eye is also directed from top to bottom. That is the difference, gentlemen.

It is like this: when we look at a chair – it doesn't even have to be a flower – a little bit of brain sand forms in there through the act of looking, and if we were now to just abandon ourselves to this looking, we would get a very small – much smaller than it can be in the microscope – a tiny little image made of silica sand of this chair. And if I were to stand in such a room, and I had developed a certain power of observation as a human being, the whole room would be reversed in me, only with the floor at the top, as an image composed of tiny pebbles. It is quite colossal how we are constantly building in ourselves. Only we are not the kind of people to let it happen. Without our consciously doing so, we dissolve the whole thing again. In this respect, we are very peculiarly constituted as human beings. We look at the world. The world constantly wants to form such shapes in us that are like the world, only reversed. And if we were not there, if we did not observe, then — especially at night when we sleep, when we do not develop the strength to dissolve from within — such formations would continually form through that which is in the universe. These formations also mainly form when the earth is not illuminated by the sun, by light, but rather they are formed by forces that come from much further away. But we are always exposed to these forces. So that we can say: When we sleep, all kinds of mineral, inanimate forms want to form in us continuously through the universe, and when we look at them, forms want to form in us that are just like our surroundings. When we sleep, we recreate the universe. In the universe, everything is arranged in a crystalline way. What we see there (in the crystals) is so because the forces in the universe are arranged just like the crystals. Some go this way, the others go that way, so that the crystals are formed from the whole universe. But this is what we want to happen in us. And when we perceive, when we look at our immediate surroundings, what is in our immediate surroundings wants to form itself. We must constantly prevent this from becoming solid, must constantly dissolve it.

Now, gentlemen, a peculiar process is taking place here. Imagine that the flower in there wants to form an inanimate image of itself out of stone. This must not be allowed to happen, otherwise we would not know the flower, but would get a headache. So that must first be dissolved.

I will make this process, which is constantly going on, even more clear to you by saying the following. Suppose you had a pot of lukewarm water here and someone blindfolded you, and after you were blindfolded, they brought some object that could be dissolved in this lukewarm water. You were to reach into this lukewarm water with your hand. You cannot see the object because you are blindfolded. But the other person can now ask you: “Reach into the water with your hand; can you feel something in there?” — “Yes, the lukewarm water.” — “Can you feel anything else in there?” — “Yes, it is cold around the fingers.

Where can that come from? The other person has put an object into the water that is dissolving! And this dissolution causes the lukewarm water around the fingers to become colder. He feels this dissolution around his fingers and can say: Something is dissolving in there.

But this is the case all the time when we have formed the object in here and have to dissolve it again. We feel the dissolution and then, because we feel the dissolution, we say: Yes, the object is out there, because it formed an image for us, and we dissolved the image. Because we have dissolved it, we know what the object looks like. Thus the thought of the object comes to us, because we must first dissolve the image of the object. Thus the thought comes. We would faint if we only had the image. But if we are strong enough to dissolve the image, then we know about it. So that is the difference between fainting when we see something or having knowledge of it.

So, consider someone who is, say, a little sickly, and there is a terrible thunder – that can happen. From this thunder, even if not through the eye, but through the ear, brain sand is deposited in him, an image is formed. He cannot dissolve this quickly enough. He may faint, lose consciousness. If he is healthy, he does not lose consciousness, which means that he has dissolved his brain sand quickly enough. So fainting means not dissolving the brain sand quickly enough. Not fainting means dissolving the brain sand quickly enough. We must always, by looking at the things around us, dissolve the brain sand quickly enough.

This brings us to the question of man's relationship to the forces in the whole universe. Last time I told you: if man's relationship to the forces in the universe is such that the brain cells in his brain are constantly dying, then they are indeed totally inanimate, and he has to handle them. That is his soul-spiritual with which he handles them. Now we even find the force that is constantly dissolving the brain cells. The cerebral sand is constantly killing the cells. The fact that cerebral sand is mixed in is what keeps killing the cells. And we have to work against that. And that, you see, is the reason why we are human: so that we can work against the cerebral sand in a certain way.

This is not the case with animals in the same way. An animal cannot work against the brain sand as much as we humans can. That is why animals do not have a head like ours, except for the higher animals. We have a head that can dissolve everything that constantly enters us. This dissolving of what comes into us is what enables a person to feel that he is saying 'I'. This is the strongest dissolution of the cerebral sand when we say 'I'. — Then we imbue our speech with consciousness. So the cerebral sand dissolves, all the nerve sand dissolves. This is not the case with animals. That is why it makes an animal scream or something similar, but not real speech. That is why no animal has the ability to feel itself, to say 'I' to itself like a human being, because a human being dissolves the brain sand to a much greater extent.

So that we can say: We are not only working against what is on earth, but we are also working against the forces of the universe. The forces of the universe would crystallize us inwardly. We would become a mountain range inside with all those layers of crystals. We are working against that inwardly. We are constantly dissolving that. We are constantly working against the forces of the universe with the dissolving forces.

And so we not only dissolve silicic acid – because that is silicic acid, which these crystals form here – we dissolve everything possible; we dissolve the components that sugar has and so on.

You can literally follow these stories. Suppose a person knows nothing at all about it properly, because such things happen like an instinct in man, but he still feels something vague in himself. Imagine, the person feels: Oh, I can't really think properly, I can't really hold my thoughts together.

A journalist who writes an article every day can very easily get into this mood. Yes, gentlemen, writing an article every day means dissolving an awful lot of brain sand! It's a really disgusting business, writing an article every day, because it means dissolving an awful lot of brain sand. And so you start, when you're supposed to be writing the article – at least that's how it used to be – nibbling on the back of the pen shaft. This is something that journalists in particular have been said to do, that they bite the back of their pen stems to draw out the last of their strength. It's true, when you bite something, you draw the last of your strength from your whole body, to have it in your head, to conquer this brain sand. You have to dissolve a lot of brain sand.

All this happens so instinctively. Of course, the journalist does not say to himself: I will bite my pen handle to get thoughts. — That can go on. In this instinct, he then goes to the coffee house and drinks black coffee. They do not think anything of it, the journalists, because they know nothing about these processes. But if they have now drunk black coffee – by Jove, there goes the story, they can write again when they have drunk black coffee.

Where does this come from? It comes from the fact that in this case the so-called caffeine is absorbed with the black coffee. This is a toxic substance that contains a lot of nitrogen. Nitrogen is in the air. But we can get it back in again. With breathing, we always get a certain amount of oxygen and nitrogen. Now, the person who has to dissolve the brain sand needs a force that lies particularly in the nitrogen to dissolve the brain sand. We draw this force from the nitrogen to dissolve the brain sand.

That is why we are more exposed to nitrogen at night when we sleep than when we are awake, and we said that by breathing in more oxygen we live much faster; if we breathe in more nitrogen, we would live much more slowly and would therefore be around for longer. We could dissolve more.

The journalist who drinks coffee unconsciously relies on this nitrogen, which he gets from coffee, and through this nitrogen, which he gets from the caffeine, he is able to create more brain sand and then also be able to dissolve more. Then he no longer needs to nibble on the quill but can write with the feather because his thoughts are connecting more and more again.

So you see how the human ego works. The human ego conveys, because you get nitrogen-rich food into the stomach, caffeine conveys this nitrogen into the brain, and this facilitates the dissolution of the cerebral sand, and we are thus able to connect one thought to another.

Some people, on the other hand, have the peculiarity that their thoughts stick together too strongly, that they cannot get away from their thoughts. They are so predisposed that they are actually always working on their brain sand. Yes, they do well when they do the opposite process. While one person's thoughts are held together by the fact that he can develop some coherent train of thought, the other person has to help himself with caffeine, with coffee. But if you don't want to hold your thoughts together too tightly, but rather let them shine and sparkle, if, as they say, you want to throw thoughts at people, which looks very witty, then you drink tea. This has the opposite effect. It scatters the thoughts. And it supports another dissolution of the cerebral cortex.

So that this story that goes on in the human being is actually an extremely interesting and complicated one. Each food works in a different way, and we must always add the opposite to what actually wants to arise. We have to dissolve it again. This is actually now our highest spiritual, through which we are constantly actually dissolving our human being internally.

And you see, when a person eats in a certain way, in that for a while they get too little of food that contains enough nitrogen, then what happens is precisely what makes them so sleepy, and one of the gentlemen also asked me about that.

So this is due to the fact that we do not get enough nitrogen with our food. And that is why, in such a case, when we become too sleepy, we must try to take in more nitrogen-rich food. This can, of course, be done in a variety of ways. But it happens especially when we try to take in, say, cheese or egg white, that is, eggs. Then the nitrogen in us is repeatedly replenished. So we have to work in the human being so that he is able to work with that which is his I in this matter.

I said to you at the beginning today: the field can be there, cabbages can grow on it; but they will not grow if the person who cultivates the cabbages is not there. But the field must also be properly prepared. So our brain must contain the necessary substances so that our I can work inside it. But this I is connected with the whole wide range of forces in the universe that want something different. These cosmic forces constantly strive to turn us into hard stones, and we must dissolve again and again. If we could not dissolve, we would not be able to think, we would not come to self-awareness. It is in this dissolution that what we call our self-awareness exists.

You see, gentlemen, these questions must first be answered sensibly if we are to go further in a scientific way to a world view, if we want to know something about man in his relationship to the world. It is most important for the human being to grasp something that is connected with his dissolution. We see a person die, which means that he now completely dissolves as a physical human being. If we do not know that dissolution is taking place in us in every waking moment, we can never grasp what dissolution means, which takes place when a person dissolves in death.

So, first of all, you have to know, gentlemen, that we can actually dissolve ourselves continuously within ourselves through our ability to work against the forces of the world within us. The dissolution is only continually suspended because nutrition provides us with the substances through which we dissolve. But when man has become so that he can no longer dissolve the substances he has within him, then he dissolves himself. Then man becomes a corpse; then he dissolves himself.

When we meet again, we must ask: What is the case when a person dissolves himself? Today we have at least come so far as to know that there is a constant process of dissolution, and if we do not have the strength — because we have too little nitrogen in us — to dissolve the things that want to form in us from the cosmos, then our ego will first become unconscious or it will become drowsy. Being drowsy means that we cannot dissolve enough; we are overwhelmed by the power of deposition. And so, these forces increase,

But just as you are when you fall asleep, because you can wake up again, so you must not conclude the spiritual from what happens externally in the body. Just as nothing can happen to the machine without the human being being present, nothing can happen to the human being without the spirit being present. That is scientific, gentlemen; the other is unscientific. This is not something that I want to tell you; it is something that a person acquires who can really take the matter scientifically very seriously.

We will continue these reflections at the beginning of September. You will see that the matter goes far into the understanding of the human being, leading to it in all possible detours, so that you can understand the human being in everyday life. You will understand the human being quite differently when we talk further, on the basis of what we have already discussed for some time. The human being is repeatedly restored, he dissolves and so on. We will continue to look at this in the near future. Then you will already see what a human being actually looks like to a real scientist.

Now, gentlemen, since there has been a fairly long interval between our lectures, I would like to pick up where we left off last time. At the time, I mainly tried to explain how sleep and waking are connected in life. I told you that we have certain small structures in the brain, they are called cells, and I also drew you the shape. These cells have the protein body here (see drawing) and then extensions, so they are star-shaped. But these extensions are unequal. One is long, the other is short. Then there is another such cell nearby that has its processes, then a third that also has its processes, and these processes, these threads that emanate from the round cells, become entangled with each other, so that they form a network. So that the brain is actually – you can't see it with the naked eye, but only if you use strong magnifications – a network, forms a network, and the little globules are embedded in this network.

You see, these brain cells are basically half dead. That is what is most striking. Because little creatures like brain cells – when they are alive, they also move. And I have already explained the other cells to you: the white blood cells swim around like little animals. They are little animals too; they look just like them. But they swim around and eat. If there is anything in the blood that they can absorb, they absorb it, stretch out their feelers and suck it into their own body. And so they swim through and flow through our body like streams. So we have half dead and half living cells swimming around in our blood.

Now it is the case that when we are awake, these brain cells are then really almost completely dead. And only because the brain cells are dead, can we think. If the brain cells were more alive, we could not think. And one can see that. Because when we are asleep, these brain cells start to come to life a little; especially when we are not thinking, when we are sleeping, the brain cells start to come to life. And the only reason they don't move is because they are so close together, because they can't get out of each other's way. Otherwise, if they started moving, we wouldn't wake up at all.

When someone becomes imbecile, i.e. can no longer think, and then dies and one examines his brain cells, then one also finds: these brain cells in a person who has become imbecile have begun to live, to proliferate. They are softer than they are in a normal person. That is why we also speak of brain softening in people who have become feeble-minded, and the term “brain softening” is not entirely bad.

If you really get to know the living human being without prejudice, you say to yourself: the life that is in him, this physical life, cannot be caused by his thinking, because that must indeed die in the brain if the person is to think. That is precisely the point. If science were to proceed correctly today, if it were to work properly, then science would not be able to be materialistic, because then one would see from the very nature of the human body that a spiritual element in him is most vividly active precisely when the physical element dies, as in the brain. So one can prove soul and spirit in a strictly scientific way.

At night, when we sleep, the brain cells are a bit more alive. That is why we cannot think. And the white blood cells, they start to become active when we are awake. That is the difference between sleeping and waking. So we are awake when our brain cells are paralyzed, almost dead; then we can think. We are asleep and cannot think when our white blood cells are somewhat deadened and our brain cells begin to have a little life. Man must therefore actually have something of death in him in relation to his body if he is to think, that is, if he is to live spiritually.

You see, gentlemen, it is not at all surprising that today's science does not come up with such things, because today's science has developed in a very special way. If you have the opportunity to see something like I have seen in Oxford, for example – I was able to give a series of lectures in Oxford, and Oxford is one of the most important universities in England – you may notice that this Oxford university is organized quite differently from our universities here in Switzerland or in Germany or in Austria. This Oxford college, university, still has something very medieval, absolutely medieval. It has such a strong medieval character that those people who do their doctorate there, that is, who do their doctorate, get a gown and a beret. Each such university has its own cut for gowns and berets. You can distinguish an Oxford Baccalaureus or Doctor from a Cambridge one because he has a different cut in his gown and beret. But people have to wear this gown and cap on certain solemn occasions so that it is known that he has been to such and such a university and belongs to it. This is just the way it is because in England many such things from the Middle Ages have been preserved, as for example with the judges there; when they are on duty, they still have to wear the wig; it is part of the uniform. Now you see, there the medieval way of doing things has been preserved in its entirety. That is no longer the case on the continent, in Switzerland, Austria or Germany. There you don't get a gown, and even judges no longer wear a wig. I believe that is no longer the case in Switzerland either, as far as I know.

For a continental European, it is very amusing to watch from the outside. He simply says to himself: Well, there they still have the Dark Ages. The bachelors, the doctors, they walk around on the street with robes and berets and so on. But it means something quite different. You see, science is still being practiced there as it was in the Middle Ages. That is to say, what is being done there is extraordinarily congenial. Compared to a modern university, which has done away with all that – I don't want the gown to be reintroduced, don't misunderstand me – but compared to some of what is at other universities today, it is actually something extraordinarily congenial, because it has a whole. It has really preserved the Middle Ages in all its forms. It has something complete. Because in the Middle Ages one could research all sorts of things, but one was not allowed to research anything about the world that religion had taken as a monopoly. This is also something that you can still feel in Oxford. As soon as someone would open up and want to say something about the supernatural world, they would be extremely reserved.

Now, medieval science had complete freedom as long as people did not express themselves about religious life. That has been lost in our country. Nowadays, at our universities, you have to be a materialist. If you are not a materialist, you are treated like a heretic. If, let us say, it were decent to burn people at the stake, they would still be burned today, even by the universities. You can see at close hand how you are treated when it comes to introducing anything new into the fields of knowledge. The external wigs have disappeared, but the internal wigs have not disappeared at all on the continent!

It is now the case that science has developed on the continent, but this science still has the old habits, and it becomes materialistic because it has never got into the habit of dealing with the spiritual. In the Middle Ages one was not allowed to occupy oneself with the spiritual, because that was left to religion. In this way people still continue to do it today. They just occupy themselves with the body, and for that reason they learn nothing about that which is actually spiritual in man. So it is actually just a neglect on the part of science that they do not really study the things that are there.

I would like to show you this today with an example, so that you can see: anyone who really does real science today can speak scientifically of the fact that a soul or a spirit enters the body when the human being develops his body in the mother's womb, and that in death the spirit leaves the body again. This can be scientifically proven today, but you really have to know science then. You have to be able to deal with science in the appropriate way. What does science do in a particular case today? Let us say, for example, that a fifty-year-old person develops liver disease and dies of it. Well, they put him on the dissecting table, cut open his stomach and examine the liver. They find that the liver is perhaps somewhat hardened inside, and they think about where this could come from. At most, they think about what the person might have eaten that could have hardened the liver through the wrong food. But our nature is not so easy to understand that we can simply have a person, examine his liver and know what the liver is like; it is not that easy. In fact, if you just think about a person's last few years, you can't even tell from the liver why it is the way it is.

If you cut out the liver of a fifty-year-old person and find that the liver is hardened, then in most cases - not in all cases, but in most cases - the reason for this is that the person was fed the wrong kind of milk as a very young child, as an infant. What often only manifests as an illness in a person's fiftieth year has its cause in very early childhood. But why? You see, the person who can really examine the liver and who knows what the liver means in the human being can tell the following. He knows that in a very young child the liver is still fresh; it is even still developing. Now the liver is a human limb that is quite different from all other human limbs. The liver is something very special. You can see that even on the outside. If you take any organ of the human body, heart or lungs or whatever you like, you can say that this organ belongs to the whole human body. Take any organ, let's say the right lung, for example, and you can say that red blood vessels go into this right lung, and you know what that means. The red blood vessels that go in carry oxygen – you can see this passing into the body – and the blue blood vessels carry the waste products, the carbon dioxide, which has to be exhaled (see illustration).

Now, you see, every organ – stomach, heart – is set up so that red blood enters these organs and blue blood comes out. The liver is different. At first it also looks the same with the liver. If you have the liver – the liver lies under the diaphragm on the right side of the human body – you also have the matter at first that red blood veins go in and blue blood veins go out. If that were the case, the liver would be an organ like the other human organs. But in addition, a large vein containing blue blood, carbonic acid, goes into the liver, which is not the case with any other organ. So a blue vein, the so-called portal vein, goes into the liver, a mighty blue vein. It branches out everywhere inside the liver and supplies it with blue blood, blood that has become unusable for all other organ processes and that would otherwise be cleaned by breathing out the carbonic acid. We are constantly sending carbonic acid into the liver. The liver needs precisely what the other organs have to throw away.

Where does it come from? This is because the liver is a kind of inner eye. The liver really is a kind of inner eye. The liver senses – especially when it is fresh, in a child – the taste, but also the goodness of the milk that the child sucks at the mother's breast. And much later, the liver perceives everything that comes from food in the human body. The liver is an organ of perception, an eye, one might say; I could also say, a tactile organ, an organ of feeling. The liver perceives all of this.

Another human organ that perceives is the eye. But the eye perceives the external world so strongly precisely because it sits almost separately in the head. It is completely inside this bone cavity, but it is almost a separate organ. You can take it out, and it lies completely separate from the body in this bone cavity. The other senses do not lead us into the outside world as much as the eye does. When you hear, you still experience something inwardly. Music is therefore more inward than seeing. The eye is designed in such a way that it does not belong so much to the human body, but rather to the outside world.

But because blue blood goes into the liver, which otherwise throws carbon dioxide out into the outside world and is turned red again, the liver is almost as isolated from the other human body as the eye. So the liver is a sense organ. The eye perceives colors. The liver perceives whether the sauerkraut I eat is beneficial or harmful to the body, whether the milk I drink is beneficial or harmful to the body. The liver perceives this very finely, and the liver releases bile, and the bile is released – this is really the case – just as the eye releases tears. When a person becomes sad, he begins to weep. Tears do not come from the eye for no reason. The process of becoming sad is connected with the perception, with the noticing of things. And in the same way, the secreting of bile is connected with the liver perceiving whether something is harmful or beneficial to the body. It secretes more or less bile, depending on how harmful it is for the person to receive it. So we have a perception organ in the liver.

Now imagine: if the child is given unhealthy milk, the liver is constantly annoyed. And if the person is so healthy that they do not immediately develop jaundice from excessive bile secretion, there is a constant urge for bile secretion in the child. And then the liver becomes ill in the child. A person can endure a lot. He can carry around this diseased liver, acquired in infancy, for forty or forty-five years; but finally, in the fiftieth year, it breaks out: the liver has hardened.

So it really isn't the case that you just put a fifty-year-old person on the dissecting table, cut open his stomach, take out the organs, look at them and say something about them. You can't say anything. Man is not just a creature of the moment, but man is a creature that develops over a certain number of decades. And what sometimes happened fifty years ago comes to expression after fifty years. But you have to know the person completely if you want to understand that.

Now I assume that you are materialists. But if you are materialists, then consider the following. I have told you that the liver is an organ whose disease can be caused in the infant and can break out in the fiftieth year of life. Yes, gentlemen, but what about the human being? Let us assume, quite schematically, that man is a being of flesh, blood, muscles and so on. He has blood vessels in him, veins in him, nerves – all these are substances, of course, real substances. But do you believe that the substances that are in the liver, for example, of a small child who is being breastfed are still present in the fiftieth year? No, that is not the case. Take the simplest example: you cut your fingernails. If you do not cut your nails, they grow like hawk claws. You are constantly cutting a piece of material from yourself! And when you cut your hair, you are also cutting a piece of material from yourself. But you will have noticed sometimes that this does not only happen when you cut your hair and fingernails, that material goes away, but when you scratch yourself sometimes and have not washed your head for a long time, then you scratch off dandruff with it. These are pieces of skin. And if you didn't wash completely, if it weren't for sweat washing away small scales from the body, you could end up with a completely scaled body. That is, on the outside of the body, the substance is constantly falling away.

Now imagine cutting a piece of your fingernail. It grows back again. It comes from the inside out. Yes, that is how it is with the whole human body. What is on the very inside is on the outer surface after about seven years, and we can get rid of it as scales. Otherwise, only nature does that, and we don't notice how we always get rid of the fine scales. The substance, the matter of the human being, always goes from the inside out and sheds itself externally. What you have completely inside today will be on the outside after seven years and will have shed itself completely, and what you then have inside is newly formed, completely newly formed. Every seven years, the soft parts of the human substance are newly formed. When you are a small child, this even applies to certain external bony organs. That is why we only have milk teeth until about the age of seven; then they are shed and new teeth form from within. They only stay because you no longer have the strength to shed your teeth; just as you shed your fingernails, you just can't shed them. But in fact, they don't tend to last very long in modern people! Well, people can endure a lot. The teeth endure, but for how long? They become terribly damaged after some time, especially in Switzerland. It has to do with the water, the teeth becoming damaged, especially in this area.

But from this you can see that after seven years you will no longer have the substance that you have inside you today. You have expelled it and formed a new one. If it were the substance that counted, then, for example, Mr. Dollinger would not be the person sitting there today, because the substances he had back then have gone, they have evaporated. Since then he has become a completely new person in terms of substance. But he was already addressed by the same name back then. He is still the same today, but it is not the substance. That which continually holds the substance together as a force, that which, when the substance goes out of any one part of the body, carries a new one there in return – you can see the substance when you lay a person on the dissecting table, but you cannot see that which is extended as a force in the person – that is the so-called supersensible.

Yes, gentlemen, so if the liver is ruined in the infant and a liver disease emerges in the fiftieth year, then the piece of liver that lies there is completely replaced. The substance is long gone. It is not because of the substance that we have acquired a liver disease, but because of the invisible forces. They have got into the habit of not allowing the liver to work properly during infancy. The activity, not the substance, the activity has been disrupted. So if we are clear about the fact that the liver is like this, we have to say: It is quite obvious that since man is always changing the substance, he carries something within him that is not substance.

If one only grasps this thought properly, it leads to the conclusion that, for scientific reasons, it is impossible to be a materialist. Only those people who believe that a man at fifty is the same substance as he was as a child are materialists. So that is what makes it necessary, for purely scientific reasons, to think of man as having a spiritual basis, that is, to think of man as having a spiritual substance within him.

But, gentlemen, you cannot believe that these liver particles, which have long since left at the age of fifty, build up the liver, that they can contribute to the liver being built up. They just go away, they just leave the liver. For these particles of matter, there is actually nothing left there but space. What the liver continually regenerates is strength, it is something supersensible. It continually regenerates the liver.

The whole human being must become newly formed if it is to come into the world at all. The forces that are in the liver must already be there when the human being is being formed in the mother's body.

Now, you may say: in the mother's body, the female ovum and the male sperm come together, and from that, the human being arises. Yes, gentlemen, from this mixture of substances, the human being can arise just as little as the liver disease in the fiftieth year can arise from the substance that has been spoiled in the first year of life. This substance must already be there. Anyone who claims that a human being is formed from matter in the mother's womb should also claim that he can put together wood and sit down for a few years and then, after a few years, a very beautiful statue will emerge. Of course, the material must be made available to the spirit. This happens in the mother's womb. But the human being is not formed in the mother's womb; rather, this substance, like the substance of a sculptor, is worked by the spirit, and in this way, what is formed in the human being is always newly formed when a physical substance is ejected. We would really need to eat much less than we have to eat if the substance had a greater significance. Of course, when we are small children we would have to eat in order to grow larger. But if we were fully grown at twenty years of age and the substance remained the same, we would not need to eat anything afterwards. It would be a wonderful story for the employer, because children are forbidden to be used today, and the workers would no longer need to eat. So it would be a wonderful story! But the fact that we still have to eat all the time when we are fully grown proves that what remains in the human being during life is not the material, but the spiritual-soul. And that must be there before human conception takes place at all, is also there, and works on the material from the very beginning, as it continues to work on it.

When a person is born, we can see how he sleeps almost constantly in his very earliest childhood. He sleeps constantly. It is actually only healthy for a person to be awake for one to two hours at most during the very earliest infancy; otherwise, the infant should sleep continuously and also has the need to sleep almost all the time.

But what does it mean when we say that an infant needs to sleep continuously and that it should sleep? This means that its brain should still be somewhat alive. The white blood cells should not yet be shooting too vigorously through the body; they should still be calming down, these white blood cells, and the brain should not yet be dead. That is why the infant must sleep. But it also cannot yet think. As soon as he begins to think, the brain cells also begin to become more and more dead. As long as we are growing, the force that makes us bigger continues to drive processes to the brain that can keep the brain quite soft. But when we are no longer growing, when growth has ceased, then it becomes increasingly difficult for that which should go to the brain to actually reach it during sleep. And the consequence of this is that, although we learn to think better and better the older we get, our brain has a much greater tendency to be dead, and we actually die in the brain once we are fully grown, continually dying.

Now, a person can endure a lot. For a very long time, he still holds his brain in such a way that it becomes soft enough during the night. But there comes a time when the forces that drive up to the head can no longer properly supply the brain, and then it approaches old age.

What is it that a person actually dies of in reality? Of course, when any organ perishes, then the spirit can no longer work, as one can no longer work on a machine that is out of order. But apart from that, his brain becomes more and more rigid, and he can no longer organize his brain properly. During the day, the brain is continually being ruined because the body is not what the brain restores, but it is the spiritual-soul. But that is, if one may put it that way, like a poison; the spiritual soul ruins the brain during waking. That is why we must sleep, so that the brain can be restored again. When the brain could not think, then the brain would not be killed, but would become stronger and stronger. Because the arm, which does not think, but works, becomes stronger and stronger. But the brain becomes weaker and weaker with thinking. The brain is not an organ that thinks through its life, but rather it thinks by dying, and in this way the body becomes useless to the person. The spirit is there, but the body will one day become useless.

This also becomes apparent when you remember what I said: the liver is like a sensory organ, like a kind of eye in there. Yes, gentlemen, that is a liver disease when a fifty-year-old person's liver is as stiff and as hardened as I assumed earlier. But the liver is always somewhat hardened at a later age. In young children, it is fresh and soft. There are these reddish-brown tissue islets – the liver is made up of such tissue islets – connected by such a network. That is the liver tissue.

Now, this liver is quite soft and elastic in childhood. But it becomes more and more stiff and hard the older you get. Do you think the same thing happens with the eye? As you get older, the inside of the eye becomes more and more rigid. If it stiffens abnormally, then comes the cataract. If the liver stiffens abnormally, then comes internal liver hardening with liver abscesses and so on.

'But even in a healthy state, the liver is used up just as much as a sensory organ as the eye is used up. And the liver perceives less and less, as the food inside is beneficial or harmful, because it has been used up. So when one has grown old, the liver no longer serves him so well to judge these things that come into the stomach, whether they are beneficial or harmful. It is no longer so good at keeping them out. When it is healthy, the liver ensures that useful substances are distributed throughout the body and harmful substances are kept out. But if the liver has become defective, then the harmful substances also enter the intestinal glands, the lymph, and then go around in the body and cause all kinds of diseases. And that is what it does, that the one who has grown old as a human being can no longer perceive his body internally as he used to be able to perceive it through the liver. He has, I might say, become blind to his own body internally. When one is blind externally, another can guide one, can help one. But when you become blind inwardly, then the processes no longer proceed properly, then very soon comes intestinal cancer, or stomach cancer or cancer of the pylorus, or anything where the liver is not in order. Then the body is no longer usable. But then the new substances, which have to be constantly shed, can no longer be properly integrated into the body. The soul can no longer function with the human body, and the time has come when the body must be thrown away completely.

Yes, gentlemen, you can see how the body is discarded from year to year, because when you shed skin on your head or cut your nails, you throw away what has become useless. But what is inside as forces remains. But when the whole thing becomes unusable, then what works inside can no longer replace anything. Then, just as nails and dandruff and other body parts are shed, the whole body is shed, and what remains of the person is the soul. So you can say: When I understand a person, I understand both body and soul, and it is not true that a person is only something physical.

Yes, you see, one could say that this is only a religious matter. But it is not just a religious matter. Here in this Goetheanum science, it is clear that it is not just a religious matter. Through religion, man should be reassured that he does not die when his body dies. These are basically selfish feelings, and the preachers also take this into account. They tell people things so that they don't die. This is not a religious matter, but a really practical one.

Someone who merely lays a person on the dissecting table, cuts open the abdomen and looks at the liver, will not think about how to ensure that an infant is properly nourished. But anyone who knows how this happens will realize how the child should be raised so that it can become a healthy person. Establishing health in childhood is much more important than curing illness later on. But you don't know anything about it if you only see the human being as a block of matter.

Now, from this example it is easy to see what I have said. But take another example. Suppose I have a child in school and I keep feeding it all kinds of stuff, and I keep it learning until its memory is overloaded and the child can't really come to itself. Yes, gentlemen, that's when you really strain the mind. But it is not true that you only strain the mind, because the mind is constantly working on the body. And if I teach and educate the child wrongly, even if it is only, let's say, in terms of memory, then I harden certain organs in him because what is used in the brain is lost to the other organs. And if you put too much strain on the child's brain, his kidneys will become diseased. That means that you can make a child sick not only through physical influences, but also by teaching and educating the child in such a way that you make it healthy or sick.

You see, this is where history comes in handy. If you really know the human being, then you will have proper teaching in schools. If you know the human being as today's science knows it, then you can present to people at the universities what we have seen: the liver looks like this, we have reddish-brown liver islets and so on. And what I have described to you can, of course, be described at the university. But afterwards you fall silent.

Such a science is not practical because it cannot be taught in schools. Teachers cannot use such a science. Teachers can only use it when they know that if the liver looks like this at the age of thirty, then in order for it to develop properly, they have to do this in the eighth or ninth year of life, not demand that the child do visual instruction, but rather teach the child something in the eighth or ninth year that guides his organs in the right way. So, for example, I have to tell him something and let him retell it to me, and I must not overload the memory, but leave it to itself. You bring that out by knowing the person in body, soul and spirit. But then you can also educate properly.

Now I ask you, is that not the most important thing, that you do not just calm people with a story from the supernatural through sermons, that they do not die when their body dies? Of course that is not done – I have proved it to you – but the result is that one only works with people's egotism, who just wish to live on, and one accommodates these wishes. Science does not deal with wishes but with facts, and these facts, when one knows them, make the whole story practical. There is something to be brought into the school if one really knows the human being.

And this is what distinguishes this Goetheanum science from other sciences. Here we would like to gradually bring about a situation in which science is not only applicable to a few people who happen to belong to the scientific community, but where science is generally human, benefits humanity and works for the development of humanity.

Today's science is only practically applied in technology, sometimes in this or that other field, for example in medicine, but not very much there either. Yes, gentlemen, theology is taught or history is taught – yes, ask whether this is applied anywhere in life. Not even in the pulpit can the theologian apply his science; he has to speak as the people want to hear it. Or ask the lawyer, the attorney, the judge! He learns his stuff so that he has it committed to memory and knows it in the exam. But afterwards he forgets it as quickly as possible, because outside he is guided by completely different laws. Nothing is applied to the living human being. In short, we have a science that is no longer practical for life. And that is the worst part.

From this you can also see that classes of people are really forming. In life, what is in life must also be applied. So if there is a science that cannot be applied, an useless science, then the people who pursue this science are also useless in a certain sense, and then an useless class of people arises. There you have the class differences.

I have tried to show in my “Key Points” that class differences are actually connected with intellectual life. But when you point out the truth, everyone declares you to be a fantasist. But here you can see for yourself that it is not a matter of fantasy, but of real, actual knowledge and of making science practical, which can really intervene in life. Then people will also be reassured about death.

Of course, some things are difficult for you, precisely because school education is not what it should be. But you will gradually understand things. And you can be sure that the others do not really understand it either. When you come to today's science under all these medieval conditions, you can see what kind of science it is. When I present the science of the Goetheanum at Oxford, it differs quite considerably from what is otherwise presented at Oxford. It is a completely different approach and will only gradually be understood.

And so I would like you to understand how difficult it is to make an impact with this. It is difficult, but it will happen and it must happen, because otherwise humanity will simply perish.

Gentlemen, the things we have discussed in the last few reflections are so important for understanding what I will say next that I want to at least briefly summarize these important things again.

We have seen that the human brain essentially consists of small star-shaped formations. But the rays of the stars are very wide. The extensions of these small entities intertwine and interweave, so that the brain is a kind of tissue, formed in the way I have told you.

Such little creatures, as they are in the brain, are also in the blood, with the only difference that the brain cells – as these little creatures are called – cannot live, only during the night, when sleeping, can they live a little. They cannot carry out this life. They cannot move because they are crammed together like sardines. But the blood corpuscles, the white blood corpuscles in the red blood there inside, they can move. They swim around in the whole blood, move their offshoots and only get something out of this life, die a little when the person sleeps. So sleep and wakefulness are connected with this activity or inactivity of the brain cells, and in fact of all the nerve cells and the cells that swim around as white blood cells in the blood, moving around in it.

Now I have also told you that it is precisely in an organ like the liver that one can observe how the human body changes in the course of a lifetime. Last time I told you that if, for example, the liver of an infant does not function properly – it is a kind of cognitive activity, the liver perceives and organizes digestion – so if the liver is disturbed in its perception, so that it actually perceives an incorrect digestion during infancy, this often only shows up in later life, I told you, in forty-five or fifty-year-old people. The human organism can withstand a lot. So even if the liver is already disturbed during infancy, it will endure until the age of forty-five or fifty. Then it shows internal hardening and liver diseases develop, which sometimes occur so late in humans and which are then a consequence of what was spoiled during infancy.

It is therefore best for the infant to be nourished with its mother's milk. Isn't it true that the child comes from the mother's body? So it can be understood that its entire organism, its entire body, is related to the mother. It therefore thrives best when it does not receive anything other than what comes from the mother's body, with which it is related.

However, it does happen that breast milk is not suitable due to its composition. Some human milk is bitter, some too salty. In such cases, it is best to switch to a different diet, provided by a different person.

Now the question may arise: Can't the child be fed on cow's milk right from the start? Well, it must be said that cow's milk is not very good as a food in the very earliest stages of infancy. But one need not think that a terrible sin is being committed against the human organism when one feeds the child with cow's milk that has been diluted in the appropriate way and so on. Because, of course, the milk of different creatures is different, but not so much so that one could not also introduce cow's milk instead of human milk for nutrition.

But if this nutrition is going on, it is going on in such a way that, if the child only drinks milk, nothing needs to be chewed. As a result, certain organs in the body are more active than they will be later when solid food has to be prepared. The milk is essentially so that, I might almost say, it is still alive when the child receives it. It is almost liquid life that the child absorbs.

Now you know that a very important thing for the human organism takes place in the intestines, an extraordinarily important thing. This extraordinarily important thing is that everything that enters the intestines through the stomach must be killed, and when it then enters the lymph vessels and blood through the intestinal walls, it must be revived. That is the most important thing to understand: that a person must first kill the food they take in and then revive it. The external life, taken up directly by the human being, is not usable in the human body. Man must kill everything he takes in through his own activity and then revive it. You just have to know that. Ordinary science does not know this, and therefore it does not know that man has the power of life within him. Just as he has muscles and bones and nerves within him, so he has an invigorating power, a life body within him.

The liver observes the entire digestive process, in which things are killed and then revived, in which what has been killed rises up inwardly in the new life and enters the blood, just as the eye observes external things. And just as in later life the eye can be affected by cataracts, that is, what used to be transparent becomes opaque, and hardens, so can the liver harden. And liver hardening is actually the same in the liver as cataracts are in the eye. Cataracts can also form in the liver. Then, at the end of life, a liver disease develops. At forty-five, fifty years of age, even later, liver disease develops. That is, the liver no longer looks at the inside of the person. It is really like this: with the eye you look at the outside world, with the ear you hear what sounds in the outside world, and with the liver you first look at your own digestion and what follows digestion. The liver is an inner sense organ. And only he who recognizes the liver as an inner sense organ understands what is going on inside a person. So you can compare the liver with the eye. In a sense, a person has a head inside his stomach. Only the head does not look outwards, but inwards. And that is why it is that a person works inside with an activity that he does not bring to consciousness.

But the child feels this activity. In the child it is quite different. The child still looks little to the outside world, and when it looks to the outside world, it does not know its way around. But all the more it looks inwardly in feeling. The child feels very precisely when there is something in the milk that does not belong there, that must be thrown out into the intestines so that it is discharged. And if something is wrong with the milk, the liver takes on the disease for the whole of later life.

Now, you can imagine that the eye, when it looks outwards, belongs to the brain. Simply looking at the outside world would not serve us as humans. We would stare at the outside world, stare all around, but we would not be able to think about the outside world. It would be just like a panorama, and we would sit in front of it with an empty head. We think with our brain, and think about what is outside in the world with our brain.

Yes, but, gentlemen, if the liver is a kind of inner eye that scans all the intestinal activity, then the liver must also have a kind of brain, just as the eye has the brain at its disposal. You see, the liver can indeed see everything that is going on in the stomach, how the entire chyme is mixed with pepsin in the stomach. When the chyme enters the intestine through the so-called pylorus of the stomach, the liver can then see how the chyme moves forward in the intestine, how it secretes more and more usable parts through the walls of the intestine, how the usable parts then pass into the lymph vessels and from these vessels then into the blood. But from there on, the liver can do nothing more. Just as little as the eye can think, so little can the liver do the further activity. There must come to the liver another organ, as to the eye the brain must come.

And just as you have the liver within you, which is constantly observing your digestive activity, so you also have a thinking activity within you, of which you are completely unaware in your ordinary life. This thinking activity – that is, you are not aware of the thinking activity, but you already know about the organ – this thinking activity is added to the liver's perception and comprehension activity just as the brain adds thinking to the eye's perception, and you have it, as strange as it may seem to you, through the kidneys, the renal system.

The kidney system, which otherwise only secretes urine for ordinary consciousness, is not at all such a base organ as one always looks at it, but the kidney, which otherwise just secretes the water, is the organ that belongs to the liver and performs an inner activity, an inner thinking. The kidneys are also connected with the other thinking in the brain, so that if the brain activity is not in order, the activity of the kidneys is also not in order. Let us suppose that we begin to cause the brain to work improperly in childhood. It does not work properly if, for example, we cause the child to study too much - I already hinted at this last time - to let it work with mere memory too much, if we make it learn too much by heart. The child needs to learn things by heart in order to develop a flexible brain, but if we make it learn too much by heart, then the brain has to exert itself so much that it carries out too much activity, which causes hardening in the brain. This causes brain hardening if we make the child learn too much by heart. But if hardening occurs in the brain, it is possible that the brain will not work properly throughout the whole life. It is just too hard.

But the brain is connected to the kidneys. And because the brain is connected to the kidneys, the kidneys no longer work properly either. A person can endure a lot; it only shows up later: the whole body no longer works properly, the kidneys no longer work properly either, and you find sugar in the urine that should actually be processed. But the body has become too weak to use the sugar because the brain is not working properly. It leaves the sugar in the urine. The body is not in order, the person suffers from diabetes.

You see, I want to make this very clear to you, that something depends on the mental activity, for example, on how much learning by heart there is, and that is how the person turns out later. Have you not heard that diabetes is particularly common among rich people? They can take extraordinary care of their children, materially and physically, but they do not know that they should also take care of a proper school teacher who does not make the child learn so much by rote. They think: Well, the state takes care of that, everything is fine, there is no need to worry about it. The child learns too much by rote, and later becomes a diabetic! You cannot make a person healthy through material education alone, through what you teach a person through food. You have to take into account what is in the soul. And you see, you gradually begin to feel that the soul is something important, that the body is not the only thing about a person, because the body can be ruined by the soul. No matter how well we eat as children and no matter how strong we are after eating the food that chemists study in the laboratory, if the soul is not in order, if the soul is not taken into account, the human organism will still break down. Through a true science, not today's purely material science, we gradually learn to tune into what is already present in a person before conception and what continues to be present after death, because we get to know what our soul is. Especially in such matters, we must take this into account.

But now think, where does it come from that people today do not want to know anything about what I have told you? Well, you can approach people with a so-called education today; it is “uneducated” to talk about the liver or even about the kidneys. It is something uneducated. Where does it come from that it is something “uneducated”?

You see, the ancient Jews in Hebrew antiquity – and after all, our Old Testament comes from the Jews – the ancient Jews did not yet regard speaking of the kidney as something so terribly uneducated. For example, the Jews did not say that when a person had tormenting dreams at night – you can read that in the Old Testament; today's Jews are educated enough not to repeat what is in the Old Testament when they are in decent company, but it is in the Old Testament – they did not say that when a person had evil dreams at night: My soul is tormented. Yes, gentlemen, it is easy to say that if you have no conception of the soul; then “soul” is just a word – it means nothing. But the Old Testament, speaking from the wisdom that humanity once had, said when someone had bad dreams at night: “Your kidneys are troubling you.” What was already known in the Old Testament is now being rediscovered through more recent anthroposophical research: kidney activity is not working properly if you have bad dreams.

Then came the Middle Ages, and in the Middle Ages, little by little, what is still valid today gradually emerged. For in the Middle Ages there was a tendency to praise everything that cannot be perceived, that is somehow outside the world. After all, the head is left free in the human being; everything else is covered up. One may only speak of that which is free. Of course, some ladies, especially in the educated world, walk around today leaving so much exposed that one is far from allowed to talk about what is exposed. But anyway, what is then inside the person has become something that, for a certain kind of Christianity in the Middle Ages — in England it was later called Puritanism — one is not allowed to talk about. One is not allowed to talk about it in terms of mere material sensuality. It is not spiritual, one must not speak of it. And so, little by little, they lost their whole spirit. Of course, if one speaks only of the spirit where the head is, one cannot grasp it so easily. But if one grasps it where it is seated in the whole human body, one can grasp it well.

And you see, the kidneys are then what thinks in addition to the perceptive activity of the liver. The liver observes, the kidneys think; and they can think the activity of the heart and can think everything that the liver has not observed. The liver can still observe the entire digestive activity and how the digestive juices enter the blood. But then, when it begins to circulate in the blood, thought is needed. And that is done by the kidneys. So that man actually has something like a second man within him.

Now, gentlemen, you cannot possibly believe that the kidneys you cut out of dead bodies and then place on the dissecting table – or, if they are beef kidneys, you even eat it; you can easily look at it before you eat or cook it – but you will not believe that the piece of meat with all the properties that the anatomist is talking about, that piece of meat thinks! Of course it does not think, but what is inside the kidney of the soul thinks. That is why it is as I told you last time: The material that is in the kidney, for example, let's say in childhood, is completely replaced after seven or eight years. There is a different substance in it. Just as your fingernails are no longer the same after seven or eight years, but you have always cut off the front part, so everything that was in the kidney and liver has been replaced by you.

Yes, you have to ask: if the substance that was in the liver seven years ago is no longer there, and yet the liver can still become ill after decades due to what was neglected in it as an infant, then there is an activity that cannot be seen, because the substance does not reproduce. Life continues from infancy to the age of forty-five. It is not the material that can become diseased – it is excreted – but the invisible activity that is there and that goes on throughout a person's entire life is what continues. There you see how the human body is actually a complicated, an extremely complicated being.

Now I would like to tell you something else. I said: the ancient Jews still knew something about how kidney activity is involved in such dull, dark thinking, as dreams are at night. But at night it is the case that our ideas have gone; then one perceives what the kidneys are thinking. During the day, our heads are full of thoughts that come from outside. Just as when there is a strong light and a weak candlelight, you see the strong light, and the weak candlelight disappears next to it. It is the same with a person when he is awake: his head is full of ideas that come from the outside world, and what is going on down there in the kidneys is just the small light; he does not perceive it. When the head stops thinking, then it still perceives as dreams what the kidneys think and what the liver looks at internally. That is why dreams look the way you sometimes see them.

Imagine there is something wrong with the intestines; the liver sees that. During the day you don't pay attention to it because there are stronger ideas. But at night when falling asleep or waking up, you notice how the liver perceives the intestinal disorder. But the liver is not as smart and neither are the kidneys as smart as the human mind. Because they are not so clever, they cannot immediately say: “These are the intestines that I see.” They create an image out of it, and the person dreams instead of seeing reality. If the liver saw reality, it would see the intestines burning. But it does not see reality, it creates an image out of it. It sees flickering snakes. When a person dreams of flickering snakes, which he does very often, then the liver is looking at the intestines, and that is why they appear to it as snakes. Sometimes the head is just like the liver and the kidneys. If a person sees something, for example, a bent piece of wood nearby and in an area where snakes could be, the head can even mistake this bent piece of wood for a snake when it is five steps away. Thus, the inner vision and thinking of the liver and kidneys considers the winding intestines to be snakes.

Sometimes you dream of a stove that is heated up. You wake up and have heart palpitations. What happened? Yes, the kidney thinks about the stronger heart palpitations, but it imagines it as if it were a stove that is heated up, and you dream of a boiling stove. That is what the kidney thinks about your heart activity.

So there inside the human stomach – although it is again 'not formed', to speak of it – sits a soul being. The soul is a little mouse that slips into the human body somewhere and sits inside. Isn't it true that people used to do that? They thought: where is the seat of the soul? But you don't know anything about the soul if you ask where the soul is located. It is just as much in the 'ear lobe' as in the big toe, only the soul needs organs through which it thinks, imagines and creates images. And in such an activity, which you know very well, it does it through the head, and in the way I have described to you, where the inner being is looked at, it does it through the liver and kidneys. You can see the soul at work in the human body everywhere. And you have to see that.

This, however, requires a science that does not simply cut open dead human bodies, lay them on the dissecting table, cut out organs and look at them materially; it requires that one really makes one's whole inner soul life visible in thinking and in everything a little more active than the people who just look. Of course it is more comfortable to cut open human bodies, to cut out the liver and then write down what you find there. There is no need to exert much mental effort. That's what the eyes are for, and it only takes a little thought to cut the liver in all directions, make small pieces, put them under the microscope, and so on. It's an easy science. But almost all science today is an easy science. We have to activate our inner thinking much more, and above all we must not believe that from the moment we put the person on the dissecting table, cut out his organs and describe them, we can get to know the human being. Because we are just cutting out the liver of a fifty-year-old woman or man and, when we look at it, we don't know what has already happened in the infant. We need a whole science. That is precisely what a real science must strive for. That is the endeavor of anthroposophy, to have a real science. And this real science does not just lead to the physical, but, as I have shown you, to the soul and to the spiritual.

I told you last time that the blue blood vessels, that is, the veins in which the blood flows not as red blood but as blue blood, that is, blood containing carbon dioxide, enter the liver. This is not the case in any of the other organs. In this respect, the liver is a quite extraordinary organ. It takes up blue blood vessels and almost makes the blue blood disappear into itself (see illustration $. 70).

This is something extraordinarily significant and important. So when we imagine the liver, the usual red veins also go into the liver. The blue veins go out of the liver. But in addition, a special blue vein, the portal vein, which contains a lot of carbon dioxide, goes into the liver (see drawing on plate 4). Now, the liver absorbs this and does not let it out again, which then enters the liver as carbonic acid through this special blue blood.

Yes, that's right. When conventional science has cut out the liver, it sees this so-called portal vein, but doesn't think much more about it. But anyone who has been able to arrive at a real science does make comparisons.

Now there are still organs in the human body that have something very similar, and that is the eyes. With the eyes, something is very small, only gently hinted at, but nevertheless, it is also the case with the eye that not all blood, all blue blood, that goes into the eye, goes back again. Veins go in, red veins go in, blue ones go out. But not all the blue blood that enters the eye goes back again, but is distributed just as it is in the liver. Only, in the liver it is strong, in the eye it is very weak.

Isn't that proof that I can compare the liver with the eye? Of course, one can point out everything that is in the human organism. That is how one comes to the conclusion that the liver is an inner eye.

But the eye is directed outwards. It peers outwards and consumes the blue blood it receives in order to look outwards. The liver consumes it inwards. Therefore, it makes the blue blood disappear inside and uses it for something else. Only sometimes, you see, the eye also gets into the habit of using its blue veins a little. That is when a person becomes sad, when he cries; then the bitter-tasting tear fluid wells up in the eyes, in the lacrimal glands. This comes from the little bit of blue blood that remains in the eye. When this is particularly stimulated by sadness, the tears come out as a secretion.

But in the liver, this story is always present! The liver is always sad because the human organism, as it is in life on earth, can make you sad when you look at it from the inside, because it is predisposed to the highest, but it just doesn't look that great. The liver is always sad. That is why it always secretes a bitter substance, bile. What the eye does with tears, the liver does for the whole organism in the secretion of bile. Only – the tear flows outwards and the tears are gone as soon as they are out of the eye; but the bile throughout the human organism does not disappear, because the liver does not look outwards but inwards. Here, the function of looking back is reduced, and the secretion, which can be compared to the secretion of tears, comes to the fore.

Yes, but, gentlemen, if what I am telling you is really true, then it must show up even more clearly in another area. It must be shown that those beings on earth who live more in their inner life, who live more in their inner thinking activity, that the animals do not think less than man, that the animals think more - thus less in their heads than man, they have an imperfect brain. But then they must observe more the liver life and the kidney life, must look more inward with the liver and think more inwardly with the kidneys. This is also the case with animals. There is external proof of this. Our human eyes are so constructed that the blue blood that enters them is actually very little, so little that today's science does not even talk about it. It used to talk about it. But in the case of animals, which live more in their inner being, the eyes do not just look, but the eyes think as well.

If one could say that the eyes are a kind of liver, one could now say that in animals the eye is much more liver than in humans. In humans, the eye has become more perfect and less liver-like. This can be seen in the eye. In the animal, it can be clearly demonstrated that there is not only what is found in humans: a glassy, watery body, then the lens of the eye, again a glassy, watery body – but in certain animals, the blood vessels go into the eye and form such a body in the eye (see drawing). The blood vessels go right into this vitreous humor, forming a body inside it called the fan, the eye fan. In these animals, it is... (gap in the transcript). Why? Because in these animals, the eye is even more liver. And just as the portal vein goes into the liver, so this fan goes into the eye. That is why it is so in animals: When the animal looks at something, the eye is already thinking; in humans, it only looks, and it thinks with the brain. In animals, the brain is small and imperfect. It does not think so much with the brain, but thinks in the eye, and it can think in the eye because it has this sickle-shaped projection, so that it can use the used blood, the carbonic acid blood, in the eye.

I can tell you something that will not really surprise you. You will not assume that the vulture, high up in the air with its damn small brain, would succeed in making the very clever decision to fall down right where the lamb is sitting! If the vulture's brain were important, it could starve to death. But the vulture has a thinking process in his eye that is only a continuation of his kidney thinking, and so he makes his decision and shoots down and catches the lamb. The vulture does not do it by saying to himself: There is a lamb down there, now I have to get into position; now I will fall down just right in that line, I will come across the lamb. — A brain would make this consideration. If there were a man up there, he would think about it; he would just not be able to carry it out. But with the vulture, even the eye thinks. The soul is already in the eye. He is not even aware of this, but he still thinks.

You see, I told you, the old Jew, who understood his Old Testament, knew what it means: God has plagued you by your kidneys in the night. - With that he wanted to express the reality of what appears to the soul as mere dreams. God has tormented you through your kidneys in the night - so he said, because he knew: There is not only a person who looks out through his eyes into the outer world, but there is a person who thinks through his kidneys and looks through his liver into the inner self.

And the ancient Romans knew that too. They knew that there are actually two people: the one who looks out through his eyes, and then the other, who has his liver in his stomach and looks into his own interior. Now it is the case that, with the liver – you can see this from the distribution of the blue veins – if you want to use the expression, you have to say that it actually looks backwards. This is why a person is so unaware of their insides; just as you are unaware of what is behind you, the liver is not consciously aware of what it is actually looking at. The ancient Romans knew this. They just expressed it in such a way that it is not immediately obvious. They imagined: a person has a head at the front, and in the lower body he has another head; but this is only an indistinct head that looks backwards. And then they took the two heads and put them together, forming something like this (see drawing): a head with two faces, one looking backwards and the other forwards. You can still find such statues today if you go to Italy. They are called Janus heads.

You see, the travelers who have the money go through Italy with their Baedeker, also look at these Janus heads, look in the Baedeker – but there is nothing sensible in it. Because, isn't it true, you have to ask yourself: how did these old Roman guys come to develop such a head? They weren't actually so stupid as to believe that if you travel across the sea somewhere, you'll find people with two heads on the ground. But the traveler, who is not educated by his eyes, must imagine something like that when he sees that the Romans have developed a head with two faces, one facing backwards and one facing forwards.

Yes, well, the Romans knew something through a certain natural thinking that all of later humanity did not know, and we will come to that now, come to it independently. So that we can now know again that the Romans were not stupid, but were clever! Janus-head means January. Why did they set it at the beginning of the year? That is also a special secret.

Yes, gentlemen, once you have come so far as to realize that the soul works not only in the head but also in the liver and kidneys, then you can also observe how it differs throughout the year. In summer, the warm season, the liver works very little. The liver and kidneys enter into a kind of sleep-like state of soul, performing only their external bodily functions, because the human being is more dependent on the warmth of the outside world. It begins to be more inactive within. The entire digestive system is quieter in midsummer than in winter; but in winter, this digestive system begins to be very mental and emotional. And when the Christmas season comes, the New Year season, when January comes and begins, the liver and kidneys are most active in the soul.

The Romans knew this too. That is why they called the people with the two faces the January people. When you independently come back to what is actually there, you no longer need to stare at things, but can understand them again. Today, people only stare at them because today's science is no longer there. You see, anthroposophy is really not impractical. It can explain not only everything that is human, but even everything that is historical; for example, it can explain why the Romans made these Janus faces! Actually, I am not saying this out of vanity. In fact, if people are to understand the world, they need to consult an anthroposophist in the guidebook, otherwise they will actually go through the world half asleep, just gawking at everything and unable to reflect.

Yes, gentlemen, as you can see, we are really serious when we say that we have to start with the physical in order to reach the soul. Well, I will continue speaking about the soul next Saturday. Then you can also think about what questions you want to ask. But you will have seen that it is really no laughing matter how one wants to get from the physical to the soul, but that it is a very serious science.

To give you, gentlemen, a more complete picture, I would like to take a closer look at what actually happens in the human body every day during certain processes. For one can only understand higher processes if one really recognizes certain lower processes. Therefore, today I would like to look again at the whole process of nutrition, both from the physical, material side and from the spiritual side.

We eat; when we eat, we first put the food in our mouths. We enjoy solid and liquid food, we take in air through breathing, through the lungs. So we enjoy solid and liquid food. But we can only use liquids in our bodies. Therefore, the solid food must be dissolved into a liquid in the mouth. This is done in the mouth. This can only be achieved in the mouth, on the palate, because small organs, known as glands, are found throughout the palate and in the oral cavity. These glands continuously produce saliva.

So you have to imagine that there are such small glands, for example, on the side of the tongue. These are small formations that are arranged in such a way that, when you look at them closely under the microscope, they look like small grapes; they are composed of cells in this way. These glands secrete saliva. The saliva dissolves the food and permeates it. The food must be salivated in the mouth, otherwise it is no good in the human organism.

Now, an activity is taking place – this salivating, this permeation of the food with saliva – and we perceive this activity, we grasp it in taste. We taste the food during the salivating through the sense of taste. Just as we perceive colors through the eye, we perceive the taste of the food through the sense of taste.

So we can say: the food is mixed with saliva in the mouth and tasted. Through taste, we become aware of the food. And through the mixing with saliva, the food is prepared so that it can be absorbed by the other body. But there must be a certain substance in the saliva of the mouth, otherwise food could not be prepared so that it is then suitable for the stomach. There must be a certain substance in it. This substance is actually present and is called ptyalin. So the ptyalin is expelled from the salivary glands in the mouth. And this ptyalin is the substance that first processes the food so that it can be used by the stomach.

Then, through the esophagus, through the throat, the food that has been salivated and processed by the ptyalin enters the stomach. In the stomach, they must be processed further. For this, there must be another substance in the stomach. This is secreted by the stomach, produced. Just as saliva with ptyalin is produced in the mouth, so too is a kind of saliva produced in the stomach. Only this gastric saliva already contains a slightly different substance. The gastric saliva once again coats the food in the stomach. So we can say that instead of ptyalin, the stomach contains pepsin.

Now, you see, in the stomach of an adult human being, and even in that of a seven-year-old child, no more taste develops. But the baby still tastes the food in the stomach just as the adult tastes the food in the mouth. So you have to go to the soul of the infant if you want to see through the human being. The adult, at most, gets an idea of this taste in the stomach when the stomach is already a bit ruined and the story from the stomach goes down instead of up. Then a person already gets an idea that there is a taste in the stomach. I assume that at least some of you have already gone through this, that something that has already been in the stomach comes back up into the mouth, and they will know that it really tastes worse than anything or at least most of the things you eat. And what would taste like what comes back from the stomach, you would certainly not find extraordinarily tasty. You don't eat things that would taste like what comes back from the stomach. But the taste that is in the chyme that comes back must have formed. It forms in the stomach. Right, in the mouth the food is only pepticized; in the stomach it is enteropepticized. And the consequence of that is that it tastes different. Taste is a very complicated thing.

Suppose you are very sensitive and you drink water. In general, if it is not contaminated water, it will not taste bad. But if you let a lot of sugar melt on your tongue, and your tongue is attuned to it, you may find that the water tastes sour. Taste is a very individual thing. But the way an adult experiences it is not formed in the mouth, but in the stomach. Of course, a child does not feel or think yet, so it does not know taste in the same way that an adult knows the taste of something in their mouth. Therefore, the child must be given foods that do not taste too bad in the stomach. And that is precisely the mother's milk or milk in general, because the child is related to the milk, and it does not get a taste that is too bad in the stomach. It is born out of the body that can produce milk. So the child feels related to the milk. Therefore, the milk does not taste bad to it. However, if the child were to receive other foods too early, it would find them disgusting. Adults no longer do this because their taste has become coarser. But the child would find it disgusting because it is not related to them, because they are external foods.

Now, you see, from the stomach, after the food has been mixed with saliva in the stomach with the pepsin, the food goes into the intestines, into the small intestine, large intestine and so on, and the food pulp spreads out in the intestines.

I can write here by the stomach: childish taste.

If the chyme were to spread and nothing were to happen to it, it would become a hard, stony mass in the intestines and would destroy the person. But something else is done to this chyme.

What is done there is done first by a gland. In the mouth we have glands, in the stomach glands, and now there is a large gland behind the stomach. So when the stomach is there, behind the stomach, if you look at the human being from the front, there is a fairly large gland, and in front of this gland is the stomach. So this gland is behind the stomach. And this gland, which is called the pancreas, now in turn secretes a kind of saliva, and the saliva goes through fine channels into the intestines. So that the food is mixed with saliva a third time in the intestines. And the substance that is secreted in this pancreas is even transformed in the human being. First, the pancreas secretes it. There it is almost like the pepsin of the stomach. But then, on its way into the intestines, it changes. It becomes sharper. The food must now be treated more sharply than before. And this sharper kind of salivary substance secreted by the pancreas is called trypsin. So, we have the pancreas as the third. It secretes trypsin – at least it secretes something that becomes the pungent juice of trypsin in the intestines. This means that the chyme is secreted a third time. So something new happens to it again.

This can no longer be perceived by the consciousness of the human being in the head, as I told you last time, but what arises from the chyme is now perceived, tasted or felt by the liver and thought by the kidneys. So everything that happens in the intestines is thought by the kidneys and perceived by the liver. There is therefore a soul in the kidneys and liver, and it perceives in the same way as a person perceives through the head. Only he knows nothing about it. At most, as I told you last time, when he dreams; then the story comes to consciousness in a pictorial form. The way the chyme winds its way through the intestines like a snake, always mixing with the trypsin, has a stimulating effect, and in the dream the person perceives it as snakes. So what the person perceives is a transposition into an unclear, unclear soul life.

Now, the liver perceives the story with the ptyalin, pepsin, trypsin – I have to say it that way because, unfortunately, science has given things such awful names. And if you are already being received quite unpleasantly by science if one wants to explain things clearly, then science would be turned upside down if one wanted to give things new names; one could do it, but in order to avoid turning science upside down unnecessarily, one does not do it, continues to use the old names ptyalin, pepsin, trypsin. So it is the case that the substances are now being secreted by the saliva for the third time. And this is based on liver feeling (see diagram on page 104).

What this has to do with the liver feeling, gentlemen, you can understand by remembering what it is like – if you have ever done it – to bring a very sharp onion to your nose. Right, the tears come. If you bring horseradish to your nose, the tears come too. Why is that? It is because the horseradish or the onion acts on the lacrimal glands, and the lacrimal glands then secrete bitter tears. Yes, you see, gentlemen, the chyme that passes through the intestines is about the same as the onion or horseradish, and the liver secretes bile just as the eyes secrete tears. The onion must be perceived if it is to produce tears; it must be felt. So the liver feels this chyme and secretes bile, which is added to it. This is the fourth.

Now, after the mouth has worked through the ptyalin, the stomach through the pepsin, and the pancreas through the trypsin, the bile is added to the chyme in the intestines by the liver. And only then does thinking come through the kidneys.

When the chyme has been prepared in this way, with saliva four times, it then passes through the intestinal walls into the lymphatic vessels and from there into the blood. So we can say that an extraordinarily complicated life process takes place in the human body. From the mouth to the blood, the chyme is constantly being transformed so that it can be digested in the right way, not only by the stomach but by the whole human body.

But now this is done in a different way. You can tell yourself, if you think about it, gentlemen, if you were to do all of this in a chemical laboratory, even if you were a very clever professor, you would not be able to do it if you first had to chew the food with your mouth saliva, then with your stomach saliva, then with your intestinal saliva and finally with your bile! All this happens inside you, you do it all the time every day. But if you were to do it in a laboratory, you wouldn't be able to. Although people have brains, what happens in their stomachs in an understandable way is much more intelligent than people on earth are. And it is a very wise, very intelligent process that takes place there. You can't easily imitate it.

But you will have even more respect for this process when I describe its details. What does a person eat? A person eats plant substances, animal substances, mineral substances, and thus he gets very different substances into his mouth and his stomach and his intestines, which have to be converted, changed by the saliva.

Imagine you are eating potatoes. What does a potato consist of? The potato consists mainly of what you have in starch. You also know that starch is prepared from potatoes. So you actually eat starch when you eat potatoes. That is one of the first things you eat; we eat starch. There are many starch-like things. The potato consists almost entirely of starch, only interspersed with a few liquids, namely water. And that is why the potato looks the way it does – because it is alive, not dead. The potato is actually living starch. But that is why, as I have told you, it has to be killed. So there it is, pure starch. There is starch in all plants; whatever you eat from the plant kingdom – it contains starch.

What else do you eat? Whether you take it from the plant kingdom or from the animal kingdom, you eat protein. You eat protein in the ordinary egg; there you have it as it is, only slightly killed. But you eat protein that is added to muscle meat or plants. You actually eat protein all the time. So the second is protein and protein-like substances.

And the third thing you eat, which is different from starch and protein, is fat. Fats are different substances from starch and protein. There are fewer fats in plants than in animals. There are so-called vegetable fats. Man needs fats either from the vegetable or from the animal kingdom if he is to nourish himself properly. So fats are the third thing in what man takes in as food.

And fourthly, there are the salts. Man must always either eat food that naturally has enough salts or at least contains salts, or you know, people put a salt shaker on the table, and depending on the situation, they take the salt out of the salt shaker either with their fingers or with the small horn spoon or with the tip of a knife and add it to the soup or to the other food. This is eaten. We need this. It is the fourth thing that is eaten; I have to write salts because there are different salts.

All of this enters the intestines, and all of it is changed in the intestines.

Now, gentlemen, what comes out of all this? The fact that the food is well prepared by the saliva of the mouth and the saliva of the stomach means that it can be mixed with saliva in the intestines for a third time, and it does not harden, but it transforms, it becomes something else.

What does starch become? Starch becomes sugar. So when you eat starch, your stomach converts it into sugar. We don't need to eat sugar if we have it in us, for the simple reason that we make it ourselves if we produce enough of it. But it is the case with humans that they cannot make everything, even though human nature is very capable. And so it develops too little sugar, and in some people even far too little sugar. And then extra sugar has to be added to the food, or it is added so that what would otherwise be prepared by the intestines in normal life actually enters the intestines already prepared. And the intestines make sugar out of starch. This is a great skill.

One more thing: you know that people with weak stomachs do better when they eat soft-center eggs than when they eat very hard eggs. And what's more, if the eggs have already gone a bit stinky, they go bad even more quickly. The egg white is a good food, but if we put it into the intestines in a stinky state, this egg white would also go stinky and unusable in us. We cannot use the protein in our intestines as it is out there. This protein must also be converted, and above all, it must be dissolved. If you put it in water, it will not dissolve. Something completely different must be present for it to dissolve. And trypsin dissolves protein particularly well. So protein is converted into liquid protein.

And while liquid protein is being formed, something else is formed in the human organism; through the action of this intestinal saliva of the pancreas, something else is formed. As much fun as it is, alcohol is formed. Man develops alcohol within himself. You don't need to drink any alcohol at all; you have a source of alcohol within yourself. Alcohol is formed in the intestines. And when people become drunkards, it is only because their liver becomes too greedy. It is not satisfied with the alcohol that is produced in the intestines; it demands more alcohol, and that is how people become drunkards.

You see, people who knew this even cited it as a reason for drinking wine and beer. They said: There are those who are anti-alcoholic; but a person cannot be anti-alcoholic because he makes alcohol in his own intestines. — Well, but that does not, of course, justify the fact that you have to become a drunkard and drink too much alcohol. Because if you now drink too much alcohol, that is, give in to the liver in its greed for alcohol, then it becomes sick, then it degenerates through it all, proliferates. The liver must be active. The liver enlarges and the small glands become bloated. And when the liver has to work to produce bile, it does not produce proper bile. The chyme is not properly permeated with bile in the intestines. It enters the lymph vessels and blood vessels as improper chyme. This enters the heart and also attacks the heart. That is why people who drink too much beer have a diseased liver, one that looks very different from those who drink little or even those who limit themselves to the little alcohol in the human intestines, which in itself is actually enough. The degenerated liver and the degenerated heart are a result of excessive alcohol consumption. Hence the beer heart that a large number of the Munich population have. But the liver is also always degenerate. You see, you understand the degeneration and the various diseases when you look in this way at the various stages of the chyme in the organism.

Now I have told you what happens when the egg white is liquefied. Alcohol penetrates into the protein and prevents it from becoming stinky. You know that when you want to store something alive, you also store it in alcohol, because alcohol, as they say, preserves the thing. It can sustain itself. The protein can also sustain itself in the organism by being placed in alcohol by the organism itself. This is extraordinarily clever.

But the processes that take place are so delicate that a human being could not do all this. If, let us say, he wants to preserve some human limb or a small organism, to preserve a small creature, he puts it in alcohol and displays it in his scientific cabinet. But trypsin does this in a much more delicate and ingenious way in the human intestine; it breaks down alcohol and converts the protein into alcohol.

And what happens to the fats? Yes, gentlemen, the fats go into the intestines and are converted again by what is secreted by the pancreas, in combination with the bile. And two substances are formed from the fat. One of these substances is glycerine. You know glycerine from the outside, but you produce it inside yourself every day. The other substance is acid. So fats are broken down into glycerol and acids, all kinds of fatty acids.

And only the salts that remain similar remain unchanged; at most they are dissolved so that they are made easier to digest. But they actually remain as they are absorbed. So the salts remain salts (see diagram on page 106).

So, with the corresponding foods, we eat starchy substances, protein-like substances, fatty substances and salt substances. And after we have digested, instead of starch and protein and fat, we have inside us: sugar, dissolved, liquid protein, glycerine, acids and salts.

And what happens to what we have eaten? We have something completely different inside us than what we ate. We have truly transformed the story.

You see, there was a doctor here in Switzerland a few centuries ago – but he travelled a lot – whom science today rather despises, but who still had an idea of all these processes. That was Paracelsus. He was a professor in Basel. But the guys threw him out because he knew more than they did. He is still generally reviled today. He fell off a rock and smashed his head, despite being a very clever person. He spent the last years of his life in Salzburg. He was a doctor. If he had been an honorable citizen, a city councilor of Salzburg, as they say today, they would have remembered him fondly. But he was a person who knew more than the others. And so they said: He was a drunkard, was drunk and fell over the rock. - Well, that is the way of the world. So he knew something about the world and always pointed out in a strong way how there is a transforming power inside man. But that has been forgotten for centuries since that time.

And what happens to all that is inside? Here science again succumbs to a great illusion. You see, science says: All that is now being produced as sugar, liquid protein, alcohol, glycerine, fatty acids and salts, all that goes into the blood vessels and from there into the heart, and from the heart it is driven through the blood vessels into the rest of the organism. Of course, I would like to say, with the thickest that is still there – everything is liquid, but even among liquids there are thick liquids – but with the thickest that is still there, it can be so, and it is so: it passes into the veins and from there supplies the body. But, gentlemen, haven't you noticed that when there was a glass of water and you put sugar in the glass and then drank it, that it is not only sweet at the bottom where the sugar was? The whole glass of water is sweet, isn't it! The sugar, when it is liquefied, dissolves in all the water. And the same goes for salt. In that glass of water in there, there are no veins for the sugar or salt to enter from all sides, but it is absorbed.

Now, some time ago I told you that a human being actually consists of 90 percent water, or at least fluid. It is living water, but it is water. Now, do the substances that are there all need the veins to pass into the whole body? When sugar is made in the intestines, does it first need the veins to pass into the whole body? Man consists of water so that the sugar can spread through him.

Yes, people have said: If a person becomes a drunkard, then all the alcohol a person consumes goes through the intestines to the heart and from there to the entire body.

So we can say: the chyme, which now consists of sugar, liquid protein, glycerine, acids, salts, passes into the whole body; only the thickest part passes through the veins into the whole body. And so it happens that salts are deposited in the head, that salts are deposited in all the other organs, which do not pass through the Blur at all, but go directly into these organs.

Now, you see, if it were the case that a person would constantly feel all the salt that is deposited in his head, then he would have a constant headache. Too much salt in the head gives headaches. Perhaps you have heard of migraine. I have spoken about it here before. One can explain things differently at different levels. What is migraine? Migraine consists of the fact that this whole distribution is out of order and too much salt, namely uric acid salts, is deposited in the head. Instead of the uric acid salts being excreted in the urine, they remain in the head during a migraine because the other foods are not properly prepared and retain the salts. Migraine is not such a noble disease at all, although it is usually noble people who suffer from it. Migraine is a very nasty disease. That which should be secreted in the urine remains on the right side of the head because it is already deteriorating in the stomach. So that which works on the left side of the organism works on the right side of the head. I will show why this is so in the near future.

And so it happens that the story, which should actually go out through the urine, is deposited on the right side of the head.

How much salt can a person take? Well, remember what I told you before. Remember that I said: the brain water is in the head. The mere fact that the brain water is inside makes the brain so light that it can exist in the human being at all. Because a body that is simply in the air has a certain heaviness, a certain weight. But when we put it in water, it becomes lighter. If that were not the case, one could not swim. And you see, the brain, if it were not in water, would weigh about 1500 grams. I have told you this before: because the brain floats in water, it weighs only 20 grams. That's how much lighter it is; 20 grams is the only thing it weighs! But the more salts that are deposited in the brain, the heavier it becomes, because the salts increase the weight of the brain. It then becomes just too heavy due to the salts.

Now we can say: In humans, when salts are deposited in the brain, the salt is made lighter – the whole brain is made lighter (by the buoyancy). But now think about how this is different in humans than in animals. You have to imagine that the human being has his head set on top of his whole organism. There the head has a proper supporting surface. It is different with animals. The head does not have this supporting surface; instead, the head is directed purely forward. What follows from this? Well, in humans, the pressure exerted by the head, although it is very light, is absorbed by the body. In animals, it is not absorbed by the body. You see, this is the main difference between humans and animals.

Naturalists are always pondering how man has developed from animals. It is all very well to think like that, but you can't look at man that way. You can't say: the animal has so and so many bones, and man has just as many bones. The monkey has so and so many bones, and man has just as many. So it's all the same. You can't say that. In the case of the ape, the head still hangs over at the front, however upright it walks, even if it is an orangutan or a gorilla. Man is already designed so that the head sits on the body, so that the entire pressure is absorbed by the body. What happens there?

Well, something very peculiar happens. We have sugar, liquid protein, glycerine, acids, salts in us. The salts go from the stomach up to the head and are deposited there, and then have to go back again, going back through the body if there are too many of them. But with regard to the other substances, something else has to happen in the body. And there, while the substances are going up, a new transformation takes place. This happens simply because the body intercepts the force of gravity. Some of the substances become lighter and lighter, while another part settles as a thick substance. Just as when you dissolve something, a sediment also settles; so, as it were, sediment forms everywhere on the way from the stomach to the head; the finest parts go up and are converted by this gravity, which has been made lighter. And what is created when the lightest parts of the food, which go up to the head, are converted? A kind of phosphorus is created from the food. And it is actually the case that a kind of phosphorus is produced from the food, so that the food does not simply penetrate into the head. A lot of it penetrates up, sugar, glycerine and so on, all kinds of things penetrate up, but some of it is converted into phosphorus before it comes up.

You see, gentlemen, in our heads we have salts that have been absorbed almost unchanged from the outside world, and we have phosphorus that has been spread out in a finely dispersed state, actually much finer than air. And these are the main substances found in the human head: salts and phosphorus. The others are only there so that he can survive as a living being. But the most important ones are salts and phosphorus. So we can say: in the human head, the most important things are salt and phosphorus.

Now, in a way that I will show you in a moment, it can be demonstrated that if a person does not have the right amount of salt in his head, he cannot think properly. You have to have the right amount of salt in your head so that you can think properly. Salt in the head is what you have to use to think. This is in addition to what I have already told you about thinking. Things in man are just complicated.

And if we simply have too much phosphorus in us, that is, eat too fiery foods, then we become a terrible fidget who wants to attack everything, who always wants to want. Because we have phosphorus, the will is there. And if we have too much phosphorus, then this will starts to fidget. And if the organism is such that it sends too much phosphorus up into the head through its entire composition, then the person not only starts fidgeting and, as they say, fidgets around nervously in the world – this has nothing to do with nerves, but with phosphorus – but he starts raging and becomes a madman, becomes raving mad. We need a little phosphorus in us so that we can want anything at all. But if we create too much phosphorus in ourselves, we go mad.

Now gentlemen, just think about it, when someone gives you salt, how you make it think. I would advise you to take a salt shaker and try to make it think! You do it all the time; in your mind you do use salt to think. And then, please rub off a little phosphorus from a match, rub it off a little so that it becomes very fine, then light it at the bottom and try to burn it. It should now want to burn, that is, it should evaporate, but it doesn't want to! But you do this to yourself all the time. Do you not now say to yourself that there is something in you that is truly more intelligent than our stupid head, which can do very little, which cannot turn salt into a thinking being or phosphorus into a volitional being? And that is the part of us that can be called the soul-spiritual. That is the living, weaving, what can be called the soul-spiritual. It is in there inside of us, uses the salt in the head for thinking, and uses the phosphorus, which rises like a smoke, very fine, to will.

In this way, one passes from the physical to the soul and into the spiritual if one observes correctly. But what does today's science do? It stops at the belly. At most, it knows that sugar and so forth are produced in the belly; but afterwards it loses track of things as they spread out further, and knows nothing of what happens next. That is why science cannot tell us anything about the soul and spirit. This science must be supplemented and expanded. We must not limit ourselves to the stomach and think of the head only as something that is put on. But one does not see how salts and phosphor have come up. One believes that it is the same in the head as in the stomach. The whole thing depends on the fact that today's science only knows something about the stomach, but only that something arises there, but does not know that the liver perceives and the kidneys think. It does not know that either. It does not know that because it does not know anything about the head either. So it does not look for it there, and considers what is on the dissecting table to be the complete liver. But it is not the complete liver, because the soul has lost it when it was in the state in which it was simply cut out of the body. As long as the soul is inside, you cannot cut it out of the body. So you see that a serious science must continue where today's science must stop. That is what matters. That is why we built the Goetheanum here, so that science does not just know something incomplete about the gut, but can explain something about the whole body. Then it will also be a real science.

Now, gentlemen, in order to understand the human being even better than we already do, let us also look at the earth for once. When people on earth come together, the life of the human being as a physical human life cannot really be considered in isolation; rather, one must also consider the earth.

When you visit a natural history museum, you sometimes find the remains of animals and plants that lived on earth a long time ago. You can imagine, of course, that all kinds of things happen in the earth until these old animals and plants are destroyed in a certain respect. You can also consider that, for example, of certain animals in the earth, only bones are preserved at most, whereas the muscles, soft tissues, heart and other vessels are lost or destroyed very quickly. Therefore, only the fossilized bones, that is, the bones that fill with other material after the death of the animals , that is, when mud gets into them, that therefore only these hardenings, these petrifications, can be found, dug up, and that, so to speak, from what one has there, which is mostly only bone remains, one has to form an idea of what the Earth once looked like. Because you can also imagine that today's conditions on Earth could not have existed at the time when completely different animals and plants lived, because otherwise today's would not have emerged. So the Earth must have looked quite different at one time. You will be able to deduce that from what I am telling you today.

You see, around 1810, a naturalist named Cuvier, who lived in the first half of the 19th century, was said to be able to visualize what the whole animal looked like when he was given a bone. If you really study the shape of the bones, for example if you only have a single forearm bone, you can get an idea of what the whole thing must have looked like, because every single bone shape changes immediately when the whole body changes. So even from the individual bones, one can determine what the whole body looked like. Apart from the fact that we sometimes have whole skeletons of animals that once lived on earth, we have such individual bones, and one can get an idea from them of what the earth must have looked like.

I will now begin to describe a state of the earth that existed on earth in very early times, many thousands of years ago. I will describe this state to you in narrative form. We will get to know the details more precisely later, but now I will simply tell you how it once looked on the earth that we walk on today. You all know it in its present state.

That was the case. Imagine the earth, I will draw a piece of it here (see drawing); but this earth did not yet have such solid mountains as it has today, but this earth was actually like the outermost surface of the earth is when it has rained for weeks on end, yes, much more muddy. So the surface of the earth was not as solid as it is today, but it was much more muddy. If there had been people of today's kind back then, they would have either had to swim – but then they would have been constantly in the mud, that is, terribly dirty – or they would have had to constantly sink. So people in their present form did not yet exist at that time. It was a muddy, very muddy earth, and all sorts of things were in the muddy earth.

If you go out there today and pick up a stone, a stone like the one Mr. Erbsmehl once brought, or if you go deeper into Switzerland and take even harder stones, you have to imagine that they were all dissolved in the muddy earth at that time, like when you dissolve salt in water. Because in this muddy soil were all kinds of acids that dissolved everything. So, in short, it was a very strange mud that made up this soil. And above this soil, there was not yet an air like today's, not an air that only contained oxygen and nitrogen, but one in which all kinds of acids were in a gaseous state. Even sulfuric acid was in it, sulfuric acid vapors and nitric acid vapors; that was all in this air. From this you can already see that man in his present form could not have lived there. Of course, these vapors were weak, but they were in this air. And this air also had the peculiarity that it was roughly the same as if you were to slip into an old oven today and feel the warmth that is being prepared for baking bread around you. So it would have been a bit uncomfortable for today's people if they had been inside this air, which also smelled of sulfuric acid and was quite warm.

But there was another air above that. It was a bit warmer than the air below and it formed clouds. These clouds that were formed there, they kept producing lightning and huge thunder because they also contained all kinds of sulfuric acid and nitric acid and all kinds of other substances. So it kept flashing with huge lightning. That was approximately the area around the earth.

I would like to call what was up there, because it was an awfully warm air, fire-air, because we have names. It was not glowing – that is only a false idea of today's science – it was not glowing, it was not warmer than such an oven. Such a fire temperature was up there; it then became a little cooler the further down you came. So I would just like to call this air up there fire air, and what was down there, earth mud.

This gives us a rough idea of what the earth was like in the beginning. Below was a greenish-brownish mud, which sometimes became as thick as a horse's hoof, but then it dissolved again. What is winter today was back then when the mud became so thick, almost like a horse's hoof, it solidified. And in summer, when the sun shone from the outside, it dissolved again and became liquid mud. And up there was just that warm air, which contained all sorts of things that later fell out. It was only later that the air cleared.

Now, another state has arisen from this state, in which very strange animals lived. So you see, all kinds of animals lived up there in the fire air. They looked like this: they had a scaly tail, but it was flat, so that the tail served them well for flying in the fire air. And then they had wings like a bat, and a head like that too. And they flew around up there in the air when the fire air no longer had such harmful vapors in it. These animals were particularly well suited for this – of course, when the storms were particularly severe, when there was terrible thunder and lightning, then they also felt uncomfortable; but when things became gentler, when there was just a little crackling up there and a soft lightning, they liked to live in this lightning, in this soft flashing. They flew around and were even capable of spreading something like an electrical emanation around them and sending it further down to earth. So that if a person had been down there, he would even have noticed from these electrical radiations: there is a flock of birds up there again. They were small dragon birds that spread electrical radiations around them and actually had their existence in the fire air in there.

You see, these birds, these dragon birds that were there, they were really very, very finely organized. They had very fine senses. The eagles and vultures that later emerged from them, after these guys had transformed, only retained the strong eyes from what these old guys had. But these guys sensed everything, especially with their bat-like wings, which were terribly sensitive, almost as sensitive as our eyes. With these wings they could perceive; they sensed everything that was going on. So, for example, when the moon was shining, they had such a sense of well-being in their wings that they moved their wings; just as a dog wags its tail when it is happy, so these guys moved their wings. They felt good in the moonlight. They roamed around and particularly liked making little fire clouds around themselves, as only the fireflies in the grass have preserved today. When the moon shone, they were up there like glowing clouds. And if there had been people back then, they would have seen such flocks of glowing balls and glowing clouds up there.

And when the sun shone – yes, back then it was the case that they then lost the desire to spread luminous bodies! They withdrew more into themselves, and then they actually processed what they had absorbed from the air – all the substances that they absorbed were still dissolved in the air. They nourished themselves by absorbing. They then digested this in the sun. They were just strange creatures. And they were once really present in the fire air of the earth.

If you now go further back in time, to the point where the earth started to form mud, you will find animals that are characterized by the fact that they were of gigantic size, gigantic... (gap in the text), when you consider these animals that once lived on the earth, half swimming and half wading in the mud. Now, there are already remains of these animals that can also be seen in natural science museums. These giants that once existed are called ichthyosaurs, fish dinosaurs. These ichthyosaurs were animals that can be said to have already lived on Earth. These ichthyosaurs looked particularly strange. They had a kind of head (it is drawn) like a dolphin, but the snout was not so hard - so it was a dolphin's head. Then they had a body like a huge, but slender lizard, with terribly thick scales. And in the head, they had huge teeth like a crocodile. They had crocodile teeth, like all these strange triangular crocodile teeth. Then they had something like whale fins – they moved half-swimming, half-walking; these were very soft, and they could also waddle and wade in the mud with them.

So they had something like whale fins, a huge body, then a head like a dolphin, with a pointed snout forward, crocodile teeth. And the strangest thing was that they had huge eyes that now glowed. One would have seen electrical points there in the clouds. The glowing birds flew especially in the moonlight. And when dusk came, if one could have seen it, one would have been able to make the encounter, which is highly unpleasant for today's people, with a giant light that would have come towards one, with a body larger than today's whales, with fins that swam on in this muddy water and sometimes stood up when it was harder. This muddy water sometimes became as hard as the hooves of horses. You could stand on it. They moved on like this: they formed these fins into hands; they were so internally mobile. They splashed over these horny layers, which were like deserts, and swam over them again where they were softer. Then they groped over them again, and afterwards, when they came to something softer again, they moved away by swimming. And if any human being had traveled in those days in any kind of boat – he couldn't have walked, it wouldn't have been possible – he might have encountered a giant animal like this, which he could have climbed up on with a ladder. It was like climbing a mountain today. You could have encountered a whole herd of cattle! There was something completely different there once.

All this can be seen; just as Cuvier recognized an entire animal from a single bone, today we can see how these ichthyosaurs, of which remains still exist, alive, and what they could do with their huge fins, that they had such a huge eye that shone like a giant lantern from afar, so that one could have avoided it. So they moved up and over the muddy earth and in the muddy earth.

And still a little deeper, so that they waded and bathed with real pleasure in the mud and always looked terribly dirty, so greenish-brownish dirty, were other animals. These other animals sometimes just stuck their huge heads out into the softer mud, but otherwise they waddled around in it, relying mainly on the mud having hardened a little. Only sometimes did they come to the surface, sticking their heads out. And that was something quite remarkable.

These other animals, those with the huge eye, are called ichthyosaurs today in their remains. But then there were those that were a bit more terrestrial, the plesiosaurs. The plesiosaurs also had a kind of whale-like, belly-like body, heads like lizards, so a kind of whale body and heads like lizards; but their eyes were more on the sides, while the ichthyosaurs had their huge glowing eyes right at the front. The plesiosaurs had a whale body, but it was also completely covered with scales. And the strange thing was that, because they were already more sluggish, they tended to settle more and more on what looked like somewhat firmer giant boats in the muddy earth. They already had four legs, clumsy four legs, with which they could even walk quite comfortably. They no longer had fins like the ichthyosaurs, on which they leaned. The ichthyosaurs braced themselves on their fins when they came upon something hard, and where they braced themselves, the fins spread out; so they used them as feet. But these plesiosaurs had hand-like feet. And from the remains, we can see that they must have had terribly strong ribs.

This was the state of things as they once were on Earth, how the plesiosaurs led a lazy life down there, how the ichthyosaurs swam around on the Earth and flew – for the animals with the fins could also fly quite low – and above them, in the twilight and in the moonlight, these ever-shining luminary clouds, which were actually dragon-bird stars. So that's what it looked like.

Now, the plesiosaurs were lazy creatures. But, you know, there was a reason for that. The Earth itself was lazier back then than it is today. Today, the Earth rotates around its axis in twenty-four hours. Back then, it took much longer; the Earth itself was lazier. It moved more slowly around itself, and that's how everything else came about. The fact that the air is so pure today depends entirely on our earth rotating on its own axis in twenty-four hours, which means that it has become more industrious over time.

The most uncomfortable time – if you judge it from today's human point of view – the most uncomfortable time should have been for these dragon-birds, because they had a hard time. They did not see it as a bad time, but they had a huge desire and longing for what you could actually understand when you hear it told today, as if these dragon-birds had had a very bad time. That was the case. Imagine the ichthyosaur with its huge eye crawling, flying, swimming through the very warm air; but the eye, it glowed very brightly. This glowing eye attracted these birds up there like a lamp attracts a midge. You have the same phenomenon on a small scale. If you light a lamp and there is a mosquito in the room, it flies towards it and is immediately burnt. Now, these birds up there were completely mesmerized by the giant eye of the ichthyosaurs, and they plunged down, and the ichthyosaurs could eat them. So the ichthyosaurs lived on what was buzzing around in the air above them.

If a person could have walked around on this strange earth in those days, they would have said: These are giant creatures and they eat fire. — Because that's what it looked like, exactly what it looked like, like giant creatures rushing around, flying around and eating fire that would have flown to them from the air.

And these plesiosaurs – I told you, they stuck their heads out like that; their eyes also glowed, and when a bird was swooping down, they also got something.

So it all fits together when you look at the reality. A dog that you feed poorly will also show you its strong ribs. The ichthyosaurs ate all the fire from the plesiosaurs; the plesiosaurs only got the worst firebirds and therefore had such prominent ribs. You can still see today that these plesiosaurs were poorly fed in ancient times.

But I said you would think: the birds up there, those beautiful, glowing birds – because they were beautiful – those beautiful glowing birds, they didn't have it comfortable. But that was what they liked, and they felt good when they could plunge into the jaws of an ichthyosaurus. That's what they considered bliss. Just as the Turks wanted to go to paradise, so these birds considered it their bliss to plunge into the jaws of an ichthyosaurus.

But really, gentlemen, I would say, it almost became more uncomfortable for the fire-eater itself – it had to eat them because it needed them for food – but it almost became more uncomfortable for the fire-eater itself than for the others that entered its belly. The firebirds plunged into it as if into their bliss; but the ichthyosaurus became quite uncomfortable in there in his belly because all kinds of electricity developed in there. And under the influence of this fire-eating and this electricity that developed in the giant stomach that almost filled the entire Ichthyosaurus—it had almost nothing else on the surface, mainly it was filled by a giant stomach—the Ichthyosaurs gradually became weak. It took quite a long time – even the fish nature can endure a lot; I said the other day about the human nature that it can endure a lot, but also the fish nature, especially an ichthyosaurus, can of course endure even more – but little by little the ichthyosaurs became more and more weak. They developed all kinds of weaknesses. Their eyes no longer shone as brightly. They were no longer as attracted to birds. And eating hurt them more and more. These ichthyosaurs got more and more stomach aches. What did that mean? In the world, everything means something.

You see, while these ichthyosaurs were developing on Earth and eating this fire, and this fire was being digested in their stomachs, their stomachs were transformed; eventually they were no longer a real stomach. And finally it came to the point that all these ichthyosaurs themselves took on a different form. They transformed.

Modern science will only tell you: There were once other animals, and they changed. That is no better than telling people: Once upon a time, a god came down and took a piece of earth and formed Adam out of it. You can understand one as well as the other.

But what I am telling you now is easy for you to understand. Because the fact that the ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs ate the dragon birds has completely transformed their insides and they have become different animals. This was also the case because the earth was turning faster and faster - not as fast as it is today, but faster than before, when it was very sluggish - and because the air was letting more and more harmful substances fall down, which were then combined with the earth. In particular, everything sulfurous was absorbed into the earth. The air became increasingly purer, not like today's air, but already considerably purer. It only became a kind of watery air in the later state, always interspersed with dense water vapors, with fog vapors. In the early days, the air was actually much purer because it was warmer. Later it cooled down and was terribly foggy. It was actually a fog over the earth that never really stopped, not even under the influence of the sun; it was a foggy layer over the earth. The mud gradually became a little thicker, and the later stones began to crystallize out. The mud became thicker, but it was still there. At the bottom there was still some thick stuff, and in between there was always some thin stuff, brownish-greenish muddy stuff, and above it was a foggy air.

In this foggy air, huge plants appeared, really huge plants. If you go into the forest today and look at the ferns, they are tiny today. But many, many thousands of years ago, similar to these ferns, there were huge plants, with weak roots in the muddy, spongy earth, plants that towered high and formed a kind of forest where the mud of the earth had already become somewhat thicker. So that later a state of the earth came, which was already a bit thicker. There were already all kinds of rocks – they had become solid, not very strong, a bit coarser, like wax – and in between there was mud everywhere, and out of that grew these huge fern trees, these giant trees. Where there was quite a bit of rock below, such giant forests with giant trees emerged. Then there was free space again – then it was different again. With these giant forests with huge trees that had emerged in nature for the Earth, the Ichthyosaurus and the Plesiosaurus would no longer have been able to do much. It was already too hard for the Plesiosaurus down there, and although it was still soft enough, it was too hard for the Ichthyosaurus and the Plesiosaurus would have become even more dirty: a crust would have formed around the scales. They could no longer have lived. But all these animals had already been contaminated by their fire-eating. When they came to this later Earth – but the later always means thousands and thousands of years – yes, it looked quite different. There were animals in the mud (it is drawn) that are also preserved in remains, so that we can get an idea of what these critters looked like. These critters, first of all, had a huge belly and a huge stomach, but they had a head that looked something like this, but much more clumsy, like the head of a modern-day seal. The eyes had already turned blackish, while the eyes of the earlier animals were luminous. They already had four feet, quite clumsy feet. But in addition, these creatures were completely covered with very fine hair, and the feet were actually more like clumsy hands.

And these critters led a strange life in this earth. They were on the solid earth at certain times, but deep down in the mud, and in this mud they moved. And mainly their breasts moved. They had huge breasts that were half lungs and half breasts. It was as if the lungs were still all the way out. At certain times they came and waddled and swam up to these forests and ate the fern trees. So the animals went from being fire-eaters to being plant-eaters. These animals were here (it is being drawn) and were covered as if by women's hair, they had giant heads, heads like clumsy seal heads. If you had gone for a walk back then, you could have seen these animals, as they always lived down there, breathing under water, always coming out, sitting on the banks, going to the forests. There they ate quite a lot with their huge mouths of what today you could not have eaten as food in one meal; they mainly ate a lot away from these giant forests. These are the animals that, as I said, are still around today and are called manatees today... (gap in the text).

And how did these animals actually come about? Yes, you see, it was because the earlier animals ate the air-breathing animals. And through the electrical forces, their bodies were transformed. The sea cows did not exactly develop from the ichthyosaurs I have described, but they did develop from similar animals. What they used to eat has become their outer form. What they took in internally has become their external form. Through eating, these animals have transformed.

This must now be said about today's natural science. You see, everything used to be much softer on the earth than it is today; these animals have taken on the forms that were formed in them by what they ate from the air animals.

And these dragon birds, for their part, had to change their shape again because the substances in the air were no longer the same as they used to be. They fell closer to the ground, and that is where the later birds gradually emerged.

But down below, another form has always emerged through eating. For example, from such an animal, as this Plesiosaurus was, an animal emerged that had four legs, like four huge columns (it is drawn), but on it there was also a huge belly, a head that was also similar to a seal head, Plump, it had a tail. It was also a giant animal. It was really very large. If you step on a very small wren with your feet, it is naturally underneath. This animal could have stepped on an ostrich, it was that large, it could have simply stepped on it to death. The largest animals of today would have behaved towards these animals then as the mice do now towards the larger animals. There are also remains of this animal. This animal is called Megatherium.

These animals also moved slowly, according to their constitution, just as one also moves on four pillars, and they fed on what happened to fly into their mouths, into those huge mouths, which also had crocodile teeth, but somewhat weaker ones. Some animals still survived, so there were still animals crawling around that looked like dinosaurs, like crocodiles. But these megatheriums simply trampled them to death when they came. Yes, that's how it once was!

And only now, after all this had happened, did the air gradually free itself from these water vapors - because everything that lived in water vapors - and the time came when the sun was actually sun could really have an effect on the earth, because the sun's rays were stopped earlier because the air was like an ocean, albeit a thin one, but it was like an ocean; the sun's rays were stopped. So that it was only in later times that the sun's rays came down on the earth.

Yes, gentlemen, you also have to look at this story a little more inwardly! These animals that were down there, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs – later on, manatees, megatheriums – well, they were pretty stupid animals. The ichthyosaurus was still the smartest, but the others were actually really stupid. But you can't say that about these dragon birds that were up there. I have already told you: they had an extremely fine sense. You may say: we humans are clever, we would not fly into the jaws of the ichthyosaurs like those dragon birds. But I don't think so. If you had lived in the time of the dragon birds, you would have flown into it too. But these birds were intelligent. And these birds, they had a very fine sense of the moon and the sun, just like our eyes, and these dragon birds felt it with their whole body, especially with their wings, which - only on a small scale - are imitated today in the wings of bats, which are also extraordinarily sensitive.

Now, these animals perceived the sun and the moon; the moon, as I have already explained, in such a way that they created something like an electromagnetic shell around it that was luminous. And when the moon shone on this fiery air, they also began to shine, shimmer, and flicker in the air with their own luminosity, like a St. John's nightingale. But they felt all that. And you don't need to use your imagination, but can proceed quite scientifically and thus also know that these animals perceived the starry sky as something different than if there had been no stars. They felt so at home in the starry sky that they felt very comfortable in their wings when the stars shone on them, and that's how those wings became speckled.

Today, we can even verify this story to a certain extent if we pay close attention. Of course, very little of these birds, which had very soft bodies, has been preserved, and they are almost impossible to find in fossils; but wing imprints can be found. Those who are really good at studying fossils, especially limestone fossils, softer fossils, will find such wing imprints. But of course you have to be open-minded, not as uptight as a professor. So if it's a dragonfly wing that has made an impression – of course there's nothing left of the wing, but the imprint in the limestone – if you look more closely, you can see that there are all kinds of stars that have been imprinted. They are the traces of the impression made by the stars in the night sky on these bat wings. They sensed whether it was day or night.

Now I don't need to describe much more to you, so you will say to yourself: Yes, the whole story here looks an awful lot like what I recently described to you about the liver and kidneys! — Man still carries in his present belly a kind of replica of what has happened on the whole earth. And these dragon birds were like the eyes that the earth itself had. That is to say – I can only tell you this at the end today – the whole Earth was a fish, an animal, and all these giant animals lived in the Earth and walked around and waddled around, like the white blood cells in us. We are still such an Earth. The white blood corpuscles, which, by the way, although they are small, are not even dissimilar in shape to these animals in the past, sometimes look almost like these animals in their smallness. So the whole Earth was a giant fish, a giant animal, and these dragon birds were the movable eyes with which the Earth looked out into the space of the stars, the space of the sun, the space of the worlds and perceived it.

That the Earth is dead today is only a later development. Originally, the Earth was alive, as we are alive. And what I have described to you as megatheria, sea cows, plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs and so on, yes, that looked an awful lot like what goes around in our bodies today as white blood cells, only in giant sizes. And what I have described as dragon-birds, again looks very much like what goes on in our eyes, only it is immobile.

And so we can say: the Earth was once a giant animal that, in keeping with its size, was rather lazy, only turning slowly on its axis in space, but which looked out into space through these dragon birds, which were only movable eyes, and looked at all this. And what I have described to you, this fire-eating and so on, that also looks very similar to what happens in the stomach and intestines. And the dragon birds, they look very similar to the opposite of the white blood cells, the brain cells, as I have described them, which extend into the eyes.

In short, you can understand the earth if you see it as a dead animal. The earth is a dead animal. And only when the earth had lost its own life could the other beings, to which, as I will describe to you, man also came, live on earth.

It is just as if we as humans were to die and the white blood cells were to change into independent entities. That is how it was with this huge animal, with the earth, once. And today we stand before this huge corpse. You need not be surprised if today's geologists, who can only study the dead, merely study the corpse. Today's geologists only study the corpse of the earth. Science everywhere does the same, studying only the dead. It lays the corpse on the dissecting table. But if you want to understand something, you really have to go back to the living. The earth was once alive, flying through space, albeit very sluggishly, like a giant animal, and able to see out through the eyes it had everywhere, which were the mobile little kite birds. With them, it looked out into space.

We will continue our examination of this next time. It is a very interesting subject.

It will be necessary, gentlemen, to take a closer look at the subject we have been discussing. Last time, I was able to show you what strange creatures once populated the Earth and how these truly remarkable creatures behaved. I was finally able to point out to you that the whole Earth itself was once a living being.

You see, when we look at all the animals that once lived on Earth – last time I spoke to you about ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, megatheriums and sirenians – look at all these animals, of which remains are still present in the various museums, we find that they have one peculiarity: they are mostly covered on the outside with a scale armor and have powerful, thick forearms, paws. So, of course, you could not only have gone for a walk on such an animal – they were big enough for that – but you could also have beaten it with a mighty hammer, and the animal would not have been very uncomfortably affected by any of it, because the whole animal was surrounded by such a scale armor. In the small, however, only as very small dwarfs, only the turtles or crocodiles of these ancient animals have survived today. I would like to say that in the small format, turtles and crocodiles are what these animals once were in their huge size. So you have to imagine that these ancient animals had such a horn-like coat consisting of individual horn plates.

Now we have to get an idea of where these animals actually got this horn-like coat from. We have to study history from a very young age, not as a human being from a very young age, but how history develops from a very young age. Imagine that a dog wounds itself somewhere. The animals have strange healing instincts. You will have already seen what a dog does when it wounds itself somewhere. When a dog has a wound somewhere, the first thing it does is lick it; it covers it with saliva. And then, once it has covered it with saliva, it likes to lie in the sun and let the sun shine on it. And what happens then? A kind of scab forms over the wound. So that one can say: If this is the dog's wound (see drawing), then he covers it with saliva so that the wound is coated with saliva over its entire surface. Then he lets the sun shine on it, and the sun makes a hard crust out of what it brews there, together with the saliva, and underneath it heals. So the dog has a very strange healing instinct. It does the right thing based on its instinct.

Now we can expand a little on what we have observed. We can look at another strange phenomenon that will lead us to understand something like this wound healing here. You know, we breathe in the air. When we breathe in the air, we get oxygen inside. The oxygen spreads throughout our body. And when the oxygen spreads throughout our body, we can live. We would suffocate immediately if we could not get the oxygen. But what do we do for it? We are not exactly very grateful people for the air that gives us oxygen. We are actually quite ungrateful beings towards the air, because we combine carbon with this oxygen in ourselves, and that becomes carbonic acid, and we breathe that out again. This is actually quite ungrateful towards our environment, because we are constantly polluting the air. If someone were to stand in carbonic acid, they would suffocate. What is made of the beautiful, good breathing air inside us is what we use to pollute our environment. We constantly spread carbonic acid gas around us, in which no being – not a human being, but also not a living being that is animal-like – could live. So you see, animal life actually basically consists of the fact that it itself constantly draws what it needs to live from its surroundings, but returns the deadly substance to its surroundings. That is what animal life consists of.

However, with this animal life, things would soon go badly on the present earth if all creatures behaved as indecently as humans and animals. You see, humans and animals pollute the air. And if all creatures behaved as indecently as humans and animals, then our earth would have been destroyed long ago, with nothing left to live on; then our earth would have long since become one big cemetery. But the good thing is that plants don't behave indecently. They do the opposite. Just as we absorb oxygen and pollute the air all around, so plants absorb carbon dioxide and retain the carbon, while releasing the oxygen. So that actually only because there are plants and especially forests on earth, life on earth can exist. If there were no forests on earth, or if large companies - some of them are already doing it - were to cut down the forests, life on earth would become much less healthy. That is precisely the point, that we need the forests on earth. If we only look at the wood, then of course we are gradually making life on earth impossible by cutting down the forests. So we can say: on earth it is arranged in such a way that people and animals actually behave quite indecently, because they pollute everything, and the plants and the forests, in turn, make everything tidy.

Yes, you see, gentlemen, that is the way it is on Earth now, but it was not always like that on Earth. We just have to be clear about the fact that the Earth has changed, that it was quite different in the time I was talking about last Wednesday; you have realized that. Because when you go for a walk now, you won't come across an ichthyosaurus up on the Gempen, as you might have done back then. That is no longer the case. But the earth is constantly changing and will also look quite different in the future than it does today. But what can we see from all that we have learned now? We can say: That which is inside a person, what he gives of himself, cannot sustain him. He must get something else; on the present earth he must get what the plants give him in order to live. We cannot live on what we have inside us alone, it destroys us.

So you can see this quite clearly: that which is useful inside a person destroys us when it comes from outside. Inside, we would be quite ill if we had too much oxygen. But from the outside, oxygen must be supplied continuously.

So what is harmful on the inside is beneficial when it comes from the outside. What is beneficial on the inside is harmful when it comes from the outside. You see, gentlemen, it is so important to realize that what is beneficial internally is harmful when it comes from outside, and what is harmful internally is beneficial when it comes from outside. This is so important that if you do not understand this, you do not understand anything.

Now we can say: We now know from contemporary life that something completely different must approach us from the outside than we have within us. Something completely different must approach us from the outside.

Let us now go back to the old days, having acquired a few concepts from the present. Let us go back and imagine ourselves in the time when the ichthyosaurs walked on the earth, half walking, half swimming, and when the plesiosaurs hopped around on the earth. We place ourselves in this time. Yes, but that was also a time that was preceded by another. Now, what was it like on Earth in those ancient times, before there were ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs?

Yes, gentlemen, according to the remains we have from this ancient, very ancient time, the animals that existed back then were even clumsier than the later ones. You know, a plesiosaur – you can see this if you look at one in any museum – with its huge size, with its heavy scale armor, as heavy as a knight's armor in the Middle Ages, and with that it was a little uncomfortable to move, and with its clumsy legs – they were terribly clumsy creatures. So, you know, they weren't exactly nimble guys. But these clumsy creatures still had something that resembled feet, which were like fins that they could use to swim and even to hold on to something. So, after all, I would say that was already a kind of modern era. But the animals that existed before these clumsy ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and megatheriums were much more clumsy, because actually didn't have much more than a soft body with all sorts of things thrown together in it: a bit at the front that looked a bit like a head, a fairly long tail at the back, and a huge, huge scaly armor over it.

If you have ever seen an oyster, for example, then you can imagine that a turtle is a bit like a dwarf. Inside it has only the whole mucus-like body, and a shell around it. Now, if you imagine the shell a little differently, the scales like those of a turtle and inside it also a soft oyster body, then you get roughly the animals that were once on Earth before the ichthyosaurs and megatheriums were on Earth.

The Earth was very thick then, much thicker than milk. Everything that is now mountains was dissolved. So it was a very thick thing. In this thick sauce - the whole Earth was an awfully thick sauce in space - swam such a giant oyster. Compared to it, our whole carpentry here would have been a dwarf. They were such giant oysters that if you had drawn today's France on its back, it would have comfortably fit on it. The oldest of these animals were so huge because the Earth was also still huge. So once upon a time there were giant animals that actually consisted only of a slimy mass and that could only move like oysters, except that the oysters must have been in much thinner water. And these slimy animals, which had a huge tortoise shell, swam in this thick earth.

So you see, the earth was really something like this, like if you imagine a huge thick soup today and dumplings in it. But you have to imagine the dumplings as being very thick on one side, so that you would break your teeth if you bit into them on that side, and very soft on the other. You could then lift one side of these dumplings off; then you would get something like a hat. And the other side, that would be very soft, you could eat that. This was much softer for these animals than the one they swam in, than this thick earth. Therefore, it was also the case with these animals, as it is today only certain very small animals have preserved themselves. You will have seen snails crawling before. When the snails crawl, you can follow the trail of these snails; it is full of this slime - you will have seen that - that the snail leaves behind. Today, the sun dries up the slime. Today it is not very important. But think of the ancient times, when the earth was not as solid. These animals also left this slime in the thick earth soup, and it mixed with this thick earth soup. So these animals have always been very useful in this thick earth soup.

Today, such things can only be traced in very small traces when you walk on the path and it has rained a lot. You can see this especially here at the Goetheanum: then the earthworms crawl out. You will have seen this already, during special rainy seasons the earthworms crawl out everywhere. Where are the earthworms otherwise? They are usually inside the earth, crawling inside the earth and making holes where they crawl through. You see, if it were not for these earthworms, our fields would be much less fertile. Because what these earthworms leave behind in the earth makes the soil fertile. We must not imagine that anything in nature is unnecessary.

And so it was with these giant oysters in ancient times. They constantly secreted what they gave off as mucus into the earth soup, and thereby always refreshed this earth soup, always, always refreshed it.

But the story is this: in today's soil – yes, however much the snails and earthworms mix in what they secrete – in today's soil, it dies again. What the earthworms provide in the form of dung is very useful in the arable soil, and in a sense what the snails provide in the form of dung is also useful in the arable soil. Not only in the arable soil, but in the meadows, what is on the earth, where the snail slime sinks in, is a very, very good fertilizer. But you see, what goes into the earth through today's animals does not come to life.

But in the time I am talking about now, when these giant oysters deposited their products in the earth soup, there really was something very strange – something like that still happens today. Right, fertilization in certain lower animals, even in fairly high animals, does not occur in the same way as in higher animals and in humans, but fertilization occurs, let's say, in certain fish-like or even amphibian-like or toad-like animals, in such a way that the eggs are laid, laid somewhere, so that there is a clump of eggs somewhere that the female has laid; and the male then simply drops his seminal fluid on top of them, outside the female, and only then are the eggs fertilized, outside the female. This still happens today. So you can say: the female lays the eggs somewhere and goes away. The male finds these eggs, fertilizes them, and also goes away. So fertilization takes place externally. But it cannot happen, nothing comes of it, unless the sun shines on these fertilized eggs. If the sun does not shine on them, then nothing comes of it, they die. But if the sun shines on these fertilized eggs, then new animals come of it. This still happens today.

In the time when these giant oysters swam around in the earth soup, this mucus, when it entered the earth, had the effect that such huge animals developed again and again from the earth itself. The old ones died, but the new animals developed out of the earth itself. The earth itself continually gave birth to such extremely clumsy but gigantic animals. So the earth was such that it was itself fertilized by what these animals secreted. So you can imagine: once there was one earth life; the earth was completely one living being. But this life had to be maintained by the mucus secreted by these animals up above. If this thick soup of the earth had been alone, these thick animals here would soon have died out too. They secreted, and through that the life of the earth was continually maintained, so that the earth continually drove such animals out of itself. They then fertilized the earth itself again, and it could now again grow such animals out of itself.

But these animals, they could not have secreted this slime if something else had not been there. You see, the earth was an awfully thick soup; but I told you: the slime of the animals was much thinner than this earth soup, much thinner. How did it come about that the animals could have such thin slime? That would have been quite impossible, that the animals could have a thinner slime than the earth itself. The earth was also a pulp, a slime, but a very thick one; but these thinner lumps of slime were constantly emerging. How did they come about?

You see, gentlemen, if you have only a glass of water and in it a liquid, water in which salt is dissolved, it can happen that the salt falls down. The salt collects as a sediment at the bottom; but then the water is thinner. Only when the salt was dissolved was the water thick. Now the water has become thinner because the salt is out. So later you have thinner water above, and much thicker salt water below. And if I could turn this glass over now – no, if I did that, of course all the salt water would just flow out, and the story would not have formed. But with these ancient animals, it was like that, it turned itself over. With these old critters, it was like this: there was the thick earth; something had formed there. There was the scale armor on top and slime further down. What was the scale armor? That was nothing other than what had separated out from the thick earthen mass. Just as salt separates downward from water, so this thick, very thick mass, which then formed a scale armor like that of turtles, separated upward from the thickness of the earthen mass, but upward, so that the thinner part remained below. And so this inverted glass, or head, could lift itself out of the water. Only the salt came to the top.

And what happened to this salt? Yes, gentlemen, now we go back to what the dog does when it has a wound. When the dog has a wound, it licks it off. Then it lets the sun shine on it; then it becomes thick and kills whatever is in the wound. Otherwise, bacteria would get in and the wound would get bigger, and the whole dog would be destroyed. You see, a scab forms, a scab of what is inside. The mucus that the dog brings to the wound is something internal; when the sun shines on it, it thickens the mucus through the warmth.

It was the same with these animals in those ancient times. The sun shone on this thick earth soup, and because the sun shone on it, such thickening occurred in some places as it occurs on a wound in a dog. These were the shells. And because a thickening formed, there was a thinner mass of mucus underneath. And so these giant oysters were formed. But, you see, these giant oysters could not have formed at all if the sun had not shone. It would have been impossible. So now we have the strange fact that we have the Earth – I will draw this very small now –; the Sun shines on the Earth during the day, and the Sun brings out these giant oysters from the Earth. So we can say: Once upon a time, the Earth was a thick soup, and because the Sun shone on it from the outside, such animals formed.

But all that would have been of no use at the time, because now the earth, when these animals left their thin slime behind them as they swam through the soup, could have been fertilized. That would have been of no use. Yes, so the earth must have been something else in its interior. It must have been similar to an egg. Only in this way could it have been fertilized. Is that not obvious? The earth was once, so to speak, like an egg. Only in this way could it have been fertilized.

We have to study what it is like with such an egg so that it can be fertilized, because we come to a state of the earth when there was a thick earth soup. The beings that could fertilize, I mean, the male beings, we found them in the old days; but if the earth should have been the generally female being – we have not yet found that, we now have to look for it again. We have to figure out how the earth could have such a huge egg.

You see, gentlemen, if you want to come up with something like that, it means looking at the world a little. And strangely enough, I will now have to draw your attention to a completely different area first, to something that still exists today, but really, I would say, in such a rarefied state that many people are not aware of it in their consciousness. But it is really not just out of a certain sense of mystery that poets, when they want to depict the development of love between two lovers, have them go out into the moonlight. There is something about moonlight that has an extraordinary effect on the human imagination.

You may think that this is not really part of it, but it is. Moonlight drives out the imagination of man. And you see, it is something quite remarkable that moonlight drives out the imagination of man. When people who are currently scholars sometimes have such a surge of cleverness, they sometimes come up with very cute things, nice things. For example, a while ago in Paris there was a scholar who said to himself: With all the medicines we now have in medicine, you can do so terribly little for people, and – it is really quite strange that a Parisian scholar has finally come up with it – if you wanted to make people healthier, you could do something different. And, gentlemen, be amazed: the scholar in Paris advised people to read Goethe's “Faust” a lot – it will make them healthier than absorbing all that stuff that only stimulates the mind – because Goethe's “Faust” stimulates the imagination, and imagination is healthy. Even a materialistic scholar has found reading Goethe's “Faust” so good because it stimulates the imagination that he said: Today's people are so clever, they only use their minds; but the mind actually makes you sick. But if people would read “Faust” and put themselves in all the images that are in “Faust,” they would be much healthier.

So the scholar wanted people to imbibe a little of the healthy power of growth. People should imbibe a little of the healthy power of growth! Yes, you see, that was a moment of insight, of which today's science has few. Today's science had a healthy moment. This is healthy because it encourages you to digest better. It is really true: a person digests better when they study Goethe's “Faust” than when they study all the learned works. There they ruin their stomachs. With Goethe's “Faust” the stomach becomes healthier and healthier; but so do the other organs. And what is the reason for this? Well, because Goethe's “Faust” comes from the imagination, not from the intellect.

Imagine, when a person lets themselves be inspired by the moon, then their imagination is stimulated. So, the moon stimulates the growth forces in humans. But today this is the case to a very small extent. Isn't it true that a person feels a little warmed inside, so he feels his growth forces stimulated inwardly when he goes for a moonwalk? That's true. But it doesn't come into consideration much.

But the moon is connected to everything that life means to a person. I can give you a small fact that shows extremely strongly how the moon is connected with life. You see, today, when people are paying attention to some things that people once knew - remember, for example, what I told you here about the Roman Janus head with the two faces - you can imagine that people used to know more than they do today. They may not have been “smarter,” but they knew more. Isn't that so? Today, when everything that people once knew has been buried by people's cleverness, today one says, “Well, a human child is carried for nine months.” But medicine, which sometimes, just as it has preserved the Latin language, has also preserved old ideas – today's doctors don't want to know anything about it, but sometimes these old ideas are still there – says: the child is carried for ten months. Where does that come from, gentlemen? Well, if you do the math: a lunar month has about 28 days; ten times 28 = 280 days. A month as we have it today, calculated at 30 days, if you take that nine times, you have about the same = 270 days. This means that the nine months we have today are ten lunar months. That is the same time. In the past, people used to count in lunar months when talking about the gestation period of a child in the womb.

Where did this come from, gentlemen? Because it was still known that the development of the child in the womb is connected to the moon. It is connected to the moon. It was once known and can now be established again through anthroposophical studies that it is the moon that causes the child to be able to develop as a living being in the first place.

But this moon only affects female beings in the human and animal kingdom because they are designed to be affected. The moon no longer has an effect on the earth. It no longer produces eggs there. And yet, if you study the matter properly, you come to the conclusion that it is not only in a subtle sense that the imagination is stimulated and that our growth forces and we are set in motion when we go for a walk on the moon. The moon has a revitalizing effect in us, but it has such a strong revitalizing effect in the human and animal female body that it actually equips the child or the animal with growth forces.

Yes, you see, the moon, shining down from the sky, does not cause the earth itself to grow, because the earth is already far too dead today. So this earth, which could once be fertilized, must have been more alive.

And now you remember that I told you that what is inside a person, when it comes in from the outside, is harmful. So the moon, which shines down on the earth today, can no longer bring forth life. Why? Because its light comes from the outside, just as when the air that we ourselves have given off comes from the outside. Then it can no longer invigorate us internally. Today, the moon can no longer do anything with the earth itself. Today, the moon can only do something in the animal and human body because it is protected.

But where must the moon have been at one time so that it could make the earth itself a living being? It cannot make it a living being outside of the earth. It must have been inside the earth! Just as carbonic acid, when it is outside, can no longer make us alive, but must be inside, must develop itself alive inside, so the moonlight must not have been outside once, but inside the earth.

So imagine, gentlemen: back then, when these beings were there, the moon was not outside the earth at all, but inside it, dissolved in the thick soup. It was not yet limited at all, but it was in there, an even thicker ball. It could make the whole earth into an egg. It just comes to mind that the moon, which today only affects the imagination and the female fertilized body, that the moon, which is up in the sky today, was once inside the earth.

But then it must also have come out at some time. And you see, gentlemen, here we come to the tremendously important moment in the evolution of the earth: the moon, which is always outside today, was once inside the earth. The earth excreted it. It now surrounds it from the outside.

If we study the entire body of the earth, something remarkable comes to light. If we study the body of the Earth, we actually see that the body of the Earth consists of water, and the continents, the land masses, are floating in this water, just as these giant animals once swam in it. Europe, Asia, Africa are floating in the water, just as these giant animals once swam in the Earth soup, in the thick Earth soup. And when we study what it looks like – you know, it doesn't look the same – then we can still see today from the hollowing out of the earth and the shifting of the continents that the moon once flew out of where the Pacific Ocean is today. The moon was once inside the earth, flew out. It first hardened on the outside.

We are now looking back at an ancient state of the earth. Then the earth still had its moon inside its body. The moon made it into a mother with its substance, and the paternal substance was evoked by the sun, because the sun continually produced such lumps of slime, which surrounded it on the outside with a thick coat of horn. That was caused by the sunbeam. And these floating lumps of slime have continually fertilized what was at the bottom of the earth soup and what was kept alive by the moon. So that the earth was a huge egg and was continually fertilized by what the sun had done.

Yes, gentlemen, if history had gone on like that, it would have created a rather uncomfortable situation on Earth. The moon would have flown out. The earth would have become barren, and eventually everything would have died. What has been done there? Although the moon's flight out has caused the earth to die, something of the old fertilizing has been preserved in the maternal animal and human body. Before that, there was no birth at all in the way that there is now, right? Just as when you make a new loaf of bread, you take some of the old yeast and then add it, so there is still some of the old substance that you took from the moon remaining in the female bodies, so that it can be fertilized. What is fertilized there, what becomes an egg inside, is only a replica of the old earth egg. So it is no wonder that when the child is born, the moon story still haunts it, and even the time during which the child is carried is determined by the moon. Isn't it true that the baron's son must also stretch himself according to the inheritance his father leaves him? The fertilized egg must do the same, which actually comes from the old moon soup. It must still be guided by the moon, because that is where the inheritance comes from.

In general, you see, in older times people knew much more about these things. I will give you the reasons why once more. In older times, people knew much more about these things, and they said: Sol, the sun, is masculine. It does, after all, represent the masculine. This is still the case in Latin. Sol, the sun, is masculine. Luna, the moon, is feminine; in Latin it is a feminine word. Sol, the solar, fertilizes Luna, the feminine. In the German language the story is completely reversed; we say the sun and the moon, whereas in reality the sun represents the masculine and the moon the feminine. That is how confused the story has become. If we wanted to speak correctly, we would actually have to say in German: der Sonn und die Mond.

But the ancient Latins already made a joke about it and said — this is just a joke with which I want to conclude today's reflection; I just wanted to give you something here that will be much more evident next time — the ancient Latins said: First we have such a moon (see drawing); then the moon always waxes, becoming like this, and then it waxes, becoming like this; then it wanes again, becoming like this. And you see, if we take these words in the Romance languages, for example in French, we can turn this (see drawing, waning crescent) into a C, and this ( waxing moon, first quarter) into a D; but then we get croitre = to wax. But when it is waning, the moon is not waxing when it makes a C! On the other hand, when it is decroitre = waning, it waxes. So that when we look up at the sky, the moon tells us, “I am waxing,” when it is actually waning, and vice versa. This is where the saying comes from: the moon is a liar. It lies to you.

But there is a deeper meaning to this. People gradually became embarrassed to talk about the moon-related because the moon-related is connected to the origin of man. It gradually became something that was not talked about. And people lost the ability to talk about the moon-related in the right way. That is why the moon also became a liar. When you looked at it, it no longer said anything to people that they could relate to. Doctors gradually stopped talking about the fact that a child remains in the mother's womb for ten lunar months and started talking about the nine solar months, which are then roughly the same length of time. But in reality it is ten lunar months, not nine solar months. This is connected with the moon and comes from the fact that the earth once carried the moon in its belly, gave birth to the moon and threw it out into space.

Now, gentlemen, think about this: after all, I am not telling you anything different from what someone would tell you today when they talk about an old nebula, about a vapor from which the Earth was separated, and from which the Moon emerged. But that is all just a mechanical, materialistic thought! No amount of vapors could ever give rise to anything living. But what I have told you is not an old vapor. You can create as much vapor in the boiler as you like and allow something to split off – but what I am telling you leads you back to reality. And that is the reality, not the vapor from which Jupiter is said to have split off and the Earth; and when the Earth was still the same as Jupiter, it threw out the Moon. The real moon is connected with the whole growth and even with the reproduction of man, as I said, and the earth once had its own power of reproduction in it, was maternal earth, and was fertilized by the animals that were up there with their shells, and by the sunshine. The moon force in the earth has been fertilized by the sunshine. Yes, you can see how we gradually move out of the earth into space.

Of course, I am making a bit of a demand on your attention, but you can see that you can actually learn something real from it.

Last time I talked to you about the moon flying out of the earth and how that is connected to life on earth in the first place. I can already imagine that you will have many questions. We can deal with them next Saturday. Think about some of them by then. But today I still have a few things to discuss. Some questions may arise.

We have said: As long as the moon was inside the earth, what can be called the reproductive power of animal beings was quite different than later, after the moon had flown out. I have told you that in the time when the moon was still inside the earth, the moon gave the earth those forces that are, so to speak, maternal forces, feminine forces. So we can imagine that there was a time when the moon was still inside the earth. I will sketch this out for you very schematically.

When the moon was still inside the earth, it was not in the center, but a little to the outside (see drawing, left). If you look at the Earth today, you will also notice that on one side, more towards where Australia is located, there is a lot of water on the Earth, while on the side where Europe and Asia are located, there is a lot of land. So the Earth actually does not have land and water equally distributed, but the Earth is such that on one side it actually has the most land and on the other side the most water. So the material on Earth is not evenly distributed (see drawing $.149, right). It was also not evenly distributed when the moon was still inside the Earth. The moon was just lying on the side where the Earth has the inclination to be heavy. Of course, if there is a solid material, it is heavy there. So I have to draw it the way I have marked it there with white chalk.

Now you have to imagine that at that time fertilization took place in such a way that the moon, which was inside the earth, gave these giant creatures the strength to, so to speak, provide reproductive material. You can't say that back then the animals would have laid real eggs. These giant oysters were actually just a slimy mass themselves, and they just secreted a piece of themselves. So that such a gigantic oyster, as I described to you last time, which could originally have been as large as the whole of France, had a mighty shell on which one could have walked around, and towards the interior of the earth a mass of slime. The lunar forces worked on this slime, and a piece of it was secreted. That then swam further into the earth. And when the sun shone on it again – I have explained this to you vividly using the example of the dog – an egg shell was formed, and because this egg shell was formed, the slimy mass of the oyster was again inclined to secrete a piece of itself, and then a new animal could arise. So the female forces came from the moon, which was in the earth, and the male forces from the sun, which shone on the earth from the outside. Now, gentlemen, I am describing a very specific time, the time when the moon was still inside the earth.

Now you have to imagine the following. Today, when the moon is outside, outside the earth, it has a completely different effect. You also know that when carbonic acid is inside a person – I told you this last time – it has a completely different effect than when it is outside, where it is a poison. If you recall animal reproduction today, you must say: the animals have to produce eggs, and these eggs must then be fertilized in some way. So what the moon used to give when it was inside the earth is now in the animals. The animals have these lunar forces within them.

And the moon also gives forces from the outside. I told you last time: even poets know that the moon gives forces to the earth. But these are forces that stimulate the imagination, that make you more alive inside. These are forces that no longer affect reproduction, but that radiate in from the outside and can no longer effect reproduction at all.

So you have to imagine it: what the moon was able to give the earth when it was still inside, these reproductive powers, the animals have appropriated them, inherited them, and now they plant them from one animal to another. So when you look at the eggs of the animals, you have to say to yourself: the lunar forces are inside. But those lunar forces are still inside that worked when the moon was still in the earth. Today the moon can no longer do much other than stimulate the head. So today the moon works on the head. But in those days it worked precisely on reproduction. You see, that is a considerable difference. It makes a big difference whether something is inside the earth or outside of it.

Reproduction is a very strange thing. But again, we have to say that all understanding of nature depends on understanding reproduction. Because through it, the individual animals and the individual plants still arise today. If it were not for reproduction, everything would have died long ago. If you want to understand anything about nature, you have to understand reproduction. But reproduction is something peculiar on earth.

Just imagine: the elephant has the peculiarity of only being able to produce a single young at around fifteen or sixteen years of age. Take an oyster, on the other hand; it is a small, slimy animal. If you imagine this as being huge, you will have roughly the same creatures that I showed you for that time. So, you can learn something from an oyster. But the oyster is not like the elephant, which has to wait so many years to produce a young one. A single oyster can produce a million oysters in a year. So an oyster has a different relationship to reproduction than an elephant.

Now, gentlemen, another interesting animal is the aphid. You know that it occurs on the leaves of trees and can be found as a rather harmful population of the plant world. People suffer a lot from it. An aphid is, as you know, much smaller than an elephant, but it can produce several thousand million offspring in just a few weeks – a single aphid! An elephant, for example, needs about fifteen or sixteen years to produce a single offspring, but the aphid can reproduce in just a few weeks to produce several million from a single individual.

And then there are tiny animals called vortices. If you look at them through a microscope, they are just a tiny lump of mucus, and they have a thread that they wriggle along. They are very interesting animals, but they consist only of a tiny lump of mucus, like if you took a thread out of an oyster, and they swim around like that. These little Vorticelles are now able to produce a hundred and forty trillion offspring in four days – a single one! – so many zeros would be needed to write it on the blackboard. The only thing that can compete with that now is Russian currency!

So you see, there is a considerable difference in reproductive capacity between an elephant, which has to wait fifteen or sixteen years to produce a single young, and such a small Vorticella, which in four days multiplies to such an extent that one hundred and forty trillion offspring grow.

So you see, there are really very significant natural secrets here. And there is a very interesting French tale, which on the surface doesn't have much to do with it, but inwardly it does. There was an important French poet — his name was Racine. And this Racine, it took him seven years to write a play like “Athalie”. So he wrote a play like 'Athalie' in seven years. And in his time there was another poet who was terribly proud compared to Racine and said: Racine needs seven years to write a play; I write seven plays in one year! And so he came up with a fable, a story, and this story, this fable goes: the pig and the lion were once arguing; and the pig, who was proud, said to the lion: I have seven young ones every year, but you, lion, you only produce one in a year. — Then the lion said: Yes, but the only one is a lion, and your seven are pigs. And with that, didn't Racine want to brush the poet aside. He didn't exactly want to tell him that his plays were pigs, but he compared them, because he said: Well, you do seven plays like that every year, but in seven years I do one Athalie – which is world-famous today.

You see, you can say: Even in a fable like that, in a story like that, there is something to be said for taking fifteen or sixteen years, like an elephant, to have a young one, rather than being a Vorticelle, which reproduces in four days to have a hundred and forty trillion young. People already talk a lot about the fact that rabbits have so many young; if they only started talking about the Vorticelle – it's impossible to imagine such a reproductive capacity!

Now, we have to find out why such tiny animals produce so many young, while it takes an elephant so long.

Now I have told you: the sun is the actual basis for fertilization. So, even today, we still need the sun for fertilization. And I have also told you: if there is a heavenly body outside, like the moon, it only affects the head at most, but no longer affects the abdominal organs, so no longer directly affects the reproductive powers. Today, the reproductive powers must be inherited from one being to another. But, gentlemen, in a certain sense, what happens in today's reproduction is still dependent on the moon. And I will explain this to you in the following way, by going back to the sun again.

You see, we have to ask ourselves: Why does an elephant need fifteen or sixteen years to develop its reproductive ability to the point where it can have a calf? Now you all know that the elephant is a pachyderm, and because it is a pachyderm, it takes so long. A thick skin allows the sun's forces to pass through it less strongly than if you were a plant louse and were very soft and the sun's forces could get in everywhere. So the elephant's low fertility is actually related to its thick skin.

You can also tell by the fact that Think back to those huge floating oysters. Yes, a second oyster would never come into being if it only depended on the sun shining on that scale armor, on that thick skin! But this oyster, as I told you, releases a little mucus; the mucus does not yet have an oyster shell, so the sun can come upon it. And by drying the mucus and thereby creating a new oyster, it has a fertilizing effect on that oyster. Yes, when the sun's rays come from the outside, gentlemen, they can only create shells. How is it that the forces of the sun can still have a fertilizing effect?

You see, we have to look at something else to help you understand how the story actually fits together. You may know that when the farmers have harvested the potatoes, they dig quite deep pits and put the potatoes in them. Then they cover the pits again. And then later, when the winter is over, they dig up the potatoes from these pits again, because they have remained good in there. If they had simply kept the potatoes in the cellar, they would have perished. They stay quite good in there.

Where does this actually come from? It is a very interesting thing. The farmers don't know much about it. But, gentlemen, if you were a potato yourself and were buried in this pit, you would actually feel extremely good in there, if you didn't need something to eat. You see, the warmth of the sun in summer remains in there, and what the sun shines on the earth in summer, that draws more and more downwards. And if you dig into the earth in January, the warmth of the sun and all the other solar forces from summer are still there at a depth of one and a half meters.

That is the strange thing. In summer, the sun is out and warms from the outside, and in winter, the sun's power moves down and can be found further down. But it cannot go very deep down; it flows back up again. If you were a potato and were lying down there, you would be quite comfortable; you wouldn't need to heat up, because first of all there is still the warmth from the summer inside, and secondly it comes up quite warmly from below because the solar forces radiate back again. And these potatoes are actually terribly comfortable. It is only there that they really enjoy the sun. In summer they don't get much of the sun, it's even unpleasant for them. If they had heads, they would get headaches when the sun shines on them; it is actually unpleasant for the potatoes. But in winter, when they are buried in the earth, they can really enjoy the sun.

From this you can see that the sun does not only work when it shines on something, but it continues to work when its energy is absorbed and stopped by something.

Yes, gentlemen, now a peculiarity occurs. I have told you: When a body is outside the earth, it has a killing effect, either - like carbonic acid - like a poison, or like the sun here, which produces dandruff when it shines on it; it hardens the living being on which it shines. But in winter, it is not true that the sun works from the outside; it works from inside the earth. There it leaves its strength behind, working in the interior of the earth. And there it also renews the reproductive forces in the interior of the earth, so that the reproductive forces today, in our time, also come from the sun, but not from direct sunlight, but from what remains in the earth and then radiates back in winter.

It is a very interesting thing. It is just like when we breathe in carbon dioxide: then it is a poison. But when the carbon dioxide is inside our body and goes through the blood, we need it. Because if we had no carbon, we would have nothing at all inside us. We need it inside; then it is beneficial; from the outside it is a poison. Sunlight from the outside causes peeling in animals; sunlight absorbed from within and reflected back generates life and makes the animals capable of reproduction.

But, gentlemen, now imagine that you are not a potato but an elephant. You would have an awfully thick skin and would only let a little of the warmth that the earth has from the sun in. That is why it would take you an awfully long time to produce an elephant calf if you were an elephant. But imagine you were a plant louse or an oyster; in that oyster you would be just a mass of mucus near the earth's surface. The elephant is not such a mass of mucus. The elephant is closed off on all sides by its skin, so it lets this warmth, which comes from below, into itself only very slowly.

Now, you see, it is like this: animals like aphids, which also live close to the ground and on plants, have no thick skin at all; they can absorb what evaporates from the earth with the spring with terrible ease, so their reproductive powers are always quickly refreshed. And the vortices even more so, because they live in the water and water retains the warmth of the sun much more intensely, so that the stored solar warmth in the vortices produces the hundred and forty billion at the right season; that is, when they have absorbed enough of what the warmth of the sun is in the water, they can reproduce themselves terribly quickly. So we can say: Today, the Earth gives its beings the ability to reproduce by storing the forces of the sun within itself during the winter.

Now let us move on from there to the plants. You see, with plants it is like this: you know that plants also reproduce through so-called cuttings. So when a plant grows out of the earth, you can cut a cutting somewhere. You have to cut it out properly, then you can plant it and it will grow into a plant. Certain plants reproduce in this way. Where does that come from? The reason why plants have the power to reproduce even through a piece of themselves is because they have the seed in the earth during the winter. That is a very important thing for plants. If you want to somehow encourage plants to grow properly, it is the case, isn't it, that they actually have to be in the ground during the winter. They have to grow out of the ground at all. There are summer fruits, and we could talk about them later. But in the main, the plants have to develop their seeds in the soil, and then they can grow. Sometimes you can also make bulbous plants grow in water, but you have to take special measures for that, don't you. In nature, it is mainly the case that plants have to be placed in the soil and have to get their strength to grow from there.

What happens, gentlemen, when a seed is placed in the earth? There this seed is really placed in the beneficence of absorbing these forces given by the sun to the earth. The plant seed, in particular, really absorbs these forces that come from the sun into the earth.

With animals, it is much more difficult. Those animals that are actually in the earth, such as earthworms and the like, also easily absorb this power. That is why they all reproduce very prolifically, all the animals that are either very close to the earth or in the earth. Worms are also such that they have an awful lot of offspring, and for example just such worms, which unfortunately can also get into the human intestines, produce an awful lot of offspring, and man must constantly exert his own powers so that these worms do not produce an awful lot of offspring. So that if you have worms inside you, you have to use almost all your vital forces to kill these horror stories that you have inside you.

Yes, but plants are able to grow out of the ground (see drawing); down there is the root, then they grow out of the ground, and then they have the leaves, then they develop the flowers and new seeds. But, gentlemen, you know very well that when the flower begins to develop, the plant no longer grows upwards. That is very interesting. The seed of the plant, the germ, is placed in the soil; the stalk grows out of it, leaves, green leaves, and then the flower comes. There the growth is stopped, and the plant now quickly produces the seed. If it did not produce the seed quickly, the sun would use all its strength on these petals, which would be infertile. The plant would get a huge, beautiful flower at the top, with many colors, but the seed would not be able to develop. The plant finally gathers all its strength to produce the seed quickly.

You see, the sun that comes from outside has the peculiarity of making plants beautiful. When we find beautiful plants in the meadow, it is the external sun with its rays that brings out these beautiful colors. But it would make the plants die with it, just as it makes the oyster die with the oyster shell, dries up.

That is why you can see this all over the world. You can see this effect of the sun particularly well when you come to hot, equatorial regions; there all the birds are in the most wonderful colors. That is the effect of the external sun. These feathers are all beautifully colored, but they no longer contain any life force. The life force is most dead in the feathers.

And so it is with the plant. When it grows out of the ground, it has abundant life force. Then it loses more and more of it and in the end it has to gather all its strength; it still puts the very little bit of life force into the seed. And the sun makes beautiful leaves, colorful flowers, but in doing so it kills the plant. There is nothing of reproductive capacity in the colored petals.

But what does the plant do when its seed is placed in the earth? It does not just allow itself to be placed in the earth, but it brings forth growth in the leaves; it brings that forth. If I draw something green, the forces of the sun, that is, warmth, light and so on, develop it. So the forces of the sun rise up in the plant. The plant takes these with it in the seed, while the solar forces that come from outside kill the plant, so that a very beautiful flower arises. But in the middle of it all there is still the seed, which comes from the solar warmth stored up in the middle of winter. The seed does not come from this year's sun. That is just a misconception. The beautiful blossom comes from this year's sun; but the seed comes from the solar warmth of the previous year, which still has the strength that the sun first gave to the earth. The plant carries this through its entire body.

This would not be so easy for animals. The animal depends on the fact that this solar warmth comes more from outside, more from the earth, and is only refreshed. This is because the animal does not absorb the forces of the sun as directly as the plant. But the plant carries the warmth of the previous year's sun through its own body up to the seed in the flower, which has accumulated in the earth.

If you look at this story correctly – it is extraordinarily interesting, wonderfully interesting – then you say to yourself: plants and animals reproduce. They could not reproduce if the sun did not work. If there were no sun, they could not reproduce. But the sun, which is out there in the sky, apart from the earth, it is precisely what kills the ability to reproduce. It is the same as with carbonic acid: when we inhale carbonic acid, it kills us; when we have it inside us, it invigorates us. When the earth receives the sun's rays from outside, its animals and plants are killed; when the earth can give the animals and plants from its interior what is in the sun, they are invigorated and stimulated to reproduce. You can see that in plants; they develop seeds capable of reproduction only from the power of the sun, which they take with them from before, from the previous summer. What makes the plant beautiful this year comes from this year's sun. It is like that in general: the inner life grows from the past, and one becomes beautiful through the present,

Now, gentlemen, the elephant with its thick skin, but the little warmth from the earth and the little sun inside, which he gets from the earth, would be of little use to him, because he is a pachyderm. These forces do not pass through him so easily. He must have stored up a great deal of his own semen from earlier. He has stored up lunar forces. He needs them, of course, for maternal, for female reproduction. He has stored them up. The moon has emerged from the earth, and the animals that reproduce have the lunar forces within them.

You see, there is something that must be taken into account. Of course, someone could come and say: There is such a stupid fellow who says about the former, the earlier lunar forces, that such old forces still live in the eggs, in the reproductive forces. This stupid fellow claims that the present reproductive forces are from the past. – I would simply say to that person: Have you never seen that something that is alive now has something in it that is from the past? – I would show him a boy who looks so much like his father that he is, as they say, the spitting image. Yes, if you then go back – the father could even have already died; someone could have known the father when the father himself was a boy as small as the boy is now, and the person in question could say: Yes, the boy is the spitting image of his father. – But he looks just like him, the way the father was when he himself was a little boy. What you saw there thirty or forty years ago is still in the little boy now! The forces of the past are always still in what lives in the present. And so it is with the reproductive forces. What is in the present comes from the past.

You know, it was considered a particularly strong superstition that the moon should affect the weather. Well, there is also a great deal of superstition in that. But once upon a time there were two scholars in Germany, at the University of Leipzig, one of whom – his name was Fechner – said to himself: perhaps there is a grain of truth in this superstition that the moon affects the weather. So he made a note of what the weather was like at full moon and what the weather was like at new moon, and found that There is a difference; it rains more when the moon is full than when it is new. That is what he found out. You don't have to believe that yet. Such notes are not very convincing. In real science, you have to work much, much more precisely. But he did say that you just have to continue such investigations and see if it doesn't come out that the moon affects the weather.

Now at the same University of Leipzig was another man who thought he was much cleverer – Schleiden was his name. He said: Now even my colleagues are starting to talk about the moon having an effect on the weather. Gosh, that's not true, we have to fight against that with all our might! – Then the Fechner said: Well, the dispute will remain between us men, but we also have women. – You see, that was still in earlier times. When the two university professors lived in Leipzig, the university professors' wives still had an old custom in the city. They put their troughs, their vats, in the rain to get water to wash in. They collected it because water was not easy to come by in old Leipzig. There were no water pipes back then. So Professor Fechner said: Yes, our wives should sort this out. Professor Schleiden and Professor Fechner should do it this way: so that they always get the same amount of rainwater, Professor Schleiden can put out her troughs at the new moon, and my wife can put out her troughs at the full moon! — He said to himself: according to my calculations, she will then get the most rainwater.

Well, you see, the women didn't go along with it. They didn't want to go along with their husbands' science. They couldn't be convinced at all. So it came about in a curious way that a person, even when science is in the form of a man, does not believe in it, like Mrs. Schleiden, and does not say to herself: I get just as much water at the new moon as at the full moon. Instead, she wanted to put out her watering troughs even at the full moon, despite her husband's terrible ranting against Fechner.

That is something that proves nothing. But, you see, it is strange that even today, high and low tides are still connected with the sun and moon. So that one can say: tides occur quite differently during one quarter of the moon than during any other quarter of the moon. That is connected. But, gentlemen, it does not happen because the moon shines on the sea somewhere and that causes a flood, but that is an old story.

When the moon was still inside the earth, it developed its powers and caused the tides. And the earth still has these remnants of the forces themselves, through which the tide arises. No wonder, the earth is already doing it independently. Today it is a superstition to believe that the moon has an effect on the earth. But it once had an effect on the earth when it was still inside, when everything still had an effect on the earth; and the earth is still in this context inside. That is why it determines the tides. But that is only seemingly the case. Just as I look at my watch, I also say: it throws me out at ten o'clock to the hall. — So today the phases of the moon coincide with the tides, because once they were interdependent.

And so it is with the reproductive powers, insofar as they depend on the moon, insofar as they are feminine. And so it is with the reproductive powers, insofar as they depend on the sun, that is, they come from the solar power that is inside the earth.

But all the animals that reproduce so prolifically, up to the trillions, that is, those that can use these solar forces stored up by the sun through the earth, are lower animals. The higher animals and humans have these reproductive powers protected within. Some of the solar power still comes in and constantly refreshes these powers. Without this refreshment, they would not be there either. But from what solar power is inside the earth today, they would not be able to have their reproductive powers properly.

The plant can have them because it carries what lives in the earth from winter into summer through its own body. The plant has the reproductive power from the previous year.

But the elephant cannot have them from the previous year. It has it from a time millions of years ago, and it has it in its reproductive seed, which it in turn inherits from the elephant father to the elephant son. There it is inside. But from what time does it have it inside! Well, just as the plant has the reproductive power of the previous year within it, so the elephant has the reproductive power of millions of years within it. That is why the plant and the lower animals can reproduce from it, because they can still use the power stored up by the earth. These are tremendously strong reproductive powers. Those animals that depend on storing very ancient forces within themselves can only reproduce weakly.

But let us now go back to the time when there were such giant oysters: No sooner had such an oyster reached the point of being illuminated by the sun than it lost its inner strength and could only use the one that came from the earth. But it could still use it because the oyster was open at the bottom. When this oyster was as large as present-day France, it was open at the bottom and could absorb the earth forces that came from the sun. When these animals had then transformed themselves into megatheriums, into ichthyosaurs, when the sun shone on them from above, and they were no longer open from below, they were dependent on the reproductive power that they had within themselves, which was at most refreshed by the sun.

Yes, gentlemen, there must have been a time when animals acquired reproductive powers that they could not get when the sun shines from outside. There must have been a time when the sun was inside the earth, when not just a little of the sun's energy came into the earth, which remains in the earth in winter, for example, for the potatoes; but there was a time when the whole sun was inside the earth.

Now you will say: But the physicists say that the sun is so terribly hot, and if the sun were inside the earth, it would have burned everything. — Yes, gentlemen, you only know that from the physicists. But the physicists would be extremely astonished if they could see what the sun really looks like. If they could build a balloon and go up there, they would not find that the sun is so hot, but the sun is full of life forces, and it develops heat as the sun's rays pass through air and everything. That's where it develops heat first. So when the sun was once inside the earth, it was full of life forces. It could not only give the little life force that it can give today, but when the sun was once inside the earth, these living beings, animals and plants that were there at the time, could get enough of what the sun gave them, because the sun was inside the earth itself. But then these oysters did not develop any shells either, but were just slime.

And now imagine: there was the Earth, the Moon in it, the Sun was inside the Earth, oysters developed that had no shells, but were slime. Mucus formed; it smeared off, separated, and an oyster formed again, and again an oyster formed, and so on. But they were so huge that they could not be distinguished from each other. They were adjacent to each other. What must the earth have looked like back then? It was similar to our brain, where the cells also lie next to each other. There, too, one cell lies next to the other; only that they die, whereas in the past, when the sun was inside the earth, oyster cells, huge cells, were one next to the other, and the sun developed its powers, which it was constantly developing because it was inside the earth. Yes, gentlemen, now consider this: there was the earth (see drawing), here a giant oyster, there another giant oyster, again one, all such giant slime balls next to each other, and they were always reproducing. And today's oysters reproduce so quickly that they can have a million offspring in a short time; the oysters of that time reproduced even more quickly. Gosh, no sooner had the old oyster arrived than the young were already there, and they had young of their own and so on. The old ones had to dissolve again. If someone had looked at it from the outside, how this huge lump of earth was there like a big brain, of course much softer, much slimier than a brain today, how a giant oyster reproduced so quickly - but each one could have had a million offspring again - he would have seen: everyone had to defend themselves against the others because they bumped into each other. And if someone had come, an especially curious one, and had watched from a foreign star, he would have seen: There below, floating in space, is a giant body, but it is all life, constantly producing life, not just consisting of millions of nested oysters, but constantly reproducing. And what would he have seen? Exactly the same thing – only on a gigantic scale – as can be seen today when a human being's tiny egg is examined in the early stages! There, too, it is only a very small-scale process. There are also these small cell mucus vesicles that multiply rapidly.

166 otherwise the human being would not be able to reach his size in the first few weeks in which he is carried. The cells are so small that they have to multiply very quickly. If you had looked at the earth at that time, you would have seen the image of the earth: a giant animal, and within it the forces of the sun and the moon, in the whole earth inside.

You see, I have now shown you how to go back to the time of the earth's development when the earth, sun and moon were still one body. But, gentlemen, I would like to say: in Faust, if you have read or ever read it, Gretchen, who is sixteen years old, says to Faust when he is explaining his religion: “The pastor also says something like that; but it is a little different.” So you could also say: “Yes, the professors also say something like that, but it is a little different.” You say: “Once the sun was one body with the earth and the moon.” — That's what they say; because they say, isn't it: This sun, it was a giant body; then it turned, and then the earth split off as it turned. Then the earth turned further, and then the moon split off again. —- So basically, they also say that all three were once one body.

Then people come and say: That can be proved; it is already being proved to schoolchildren. It can be demonstrated terribly nicely. You take a small drop of oil – which floats on water – and then you take a sheet of card and cut out a small circle, push a pin through the top; afterwards you put it into the water and turn the head of the pin. The little oltröpfelchen split off and go around like that. There you have it, they say, there you see it: that happened once in the world! There was a huge gas ball in the world, just gas; but the story turned, and it was mobile. And then the outer things were just split off, our earth from the sun, just as these oltröpfchen were split off. They can prove that in school. And the children, who believe in authority, say: It happened quite naturally; there was once a huge ball of gas that was rotating, and that's how the planets were split off. We saw it ourselves, how the droplets were split off.

But now you must also ask the children: Did you see the schoolmaster up there turning the pinhead? So you have to imagine a giant schoolmaster who turned the gas ball at that time, otherwise the planets would not have been able to split off! — The giant schoolmaster - in the Middle Ages he was depicted: that was the Lord God with the long beard. That was the giant schoolmaster, and these people forget him.

But it is no explanation to assume a giant gas ball that rotates, and that could only rotate if a giant world schoolmaster had once existed. That is no explanation. But, gentlemen, it is an explanation when you come to the conclusion that the sun and the moon were connected to the earth and that it moved itself. That could move. A ball of gas cannot move by itself. But what I have explained to you here could move. In those days it did not need a world school master, but it was alive in itself. The Earth was once a living being, and indeed one such as a seed is today, and it contained the Sun and the Moon. The Sun and the Moon emerged from the Earth, leaving their inheritance behind, so that today the germinating power, protected in the maternal and paternal bodies of the human being, these powers, which once could come directly from the Sun, still reproduce and today develop the animals, the seeds and eggs in themselves, carry the ancient solar power in their egg and seminal fluids, carry it within themselves as an inheritance from ancient times, from the times when the earth itself still had the sun and moon within it.

You see, that is a real explanation, and only if you understand it that way can you really understand. Then you realize that there was once a time when the moon flew out and the earth flew out of the sun with the moon. We will discuss this matter further next Saturday at nine o'clock. It will still be a bit difficult, but nevertheless I believe that history looks like this so that you can understand it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does anybody else have a question that concerns you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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