Anthroposophical Medical Theory and Human Knowledge

GA 319 — 3 September 1923, London

Third Lecture

I have been told that a more extensive theoretical foundation is desired for what I presented yesterday. Now it is always the case for me that the doubts and inner opposition that must quite understandably be asserted against the way of looking at things today are driven out even more strongly, I would say, from the inner being when this spiritual foundation is given, and that I with regard to medicine, I have a little hope that it is indeed the case in this field that if the remedies help when used and it can be seen from the remedies that there is something behind the matter, we will be forgiven for the theoretical basis. So in this area in particular, if it is not expressly requested, I am somewhat reluctant to provide the theoretical basis. For the time being it must sound even more fantastic, although it is as exact as mathematics, as that which can be said about the practice of remedies. Nevertheless, since it is desired, I will not only give a brief explanation at the end, as I had intended, but I will say something about this theoretical justification right at the starting point today.

The point is that, through the admirable progress of our natural science, infinite things have been achieved in relation to the knowledge of the external physical-sensual world, but that precisely this extraordinarily significant knowledge of the external physical-sensual world has led away from grasping the human being in his total entity.

What can be grasped with the laws of nature that are being explored out there in nature today, whether through observation or experiment, does not go further in the case of man than to comprehend the sensory organization, namely that which is incorporated into man like physical apparatus as senses, and that which is the mechanics of movement. The further one really penetrates into the nature of man, the more everything else recedes, so that the external laws of nature apply less and less. Of course, I still have to be brief, so I can only hint at things in aphorisms.

But it is well enough known that a human being actually consists, let us say, of at most ten percent or a little more of the physical and mineral substances that we know in a solid state, and that a human being is, by far, the largest part, let us say, of liquid.

In this liquid column, the impulses are again effective, which, mediated, for example, by the breathing process but also by other processes of the human organization, are processes that we actually only find in nature in freely moving air. And then, as a fourth factor, there are the heating processes. The laws of nature, with which we believe we can recognize the whole human being, can only be applied to that which is present in man in the same way as we find the sharply contoured, mineral-physical substances out in nature. Curiously enough, with these laws of nature we only recognize part of the sensory organization, or rather, because the sensory organization is mainly organized in the human head, part of the human head organization. The human head organization is namely the one that most closely resembles the physical world, the constitution of the physical world.

The human nervous system originates partly from the head. In any case, it is connected with the head organization in the human being, this nervous system. Now today we believe that the entire nervous system is connected with what we call the spiritual abilities in the human being. If you look at even a psychology that is only physiologically colored today, you will see that these psychologies actually only deal with the world of thoughts, the world of thoughts in connection with the brain and nervous system. The world of feelings and the world of will in man are, so to speak, only mentioned as something incidental, and it is believed that feeling and will are just as much connected with the nervous system as the world of ideas. This is not the case.

If I go back to the threefold human being, as I characterized it yesterday, I can say that only the actual faculty of imagination is connected with the human nervous system; the life of feeling is only indirectly connected with it. On the other hand, the life of feeling is directly connected with the rhythmic system.

And here we already have one of the points where, precisely because of its admirability in other fields, today's natural science has completely blocked the path from the physical organization of man to his spiritual organization.

The truth of the matter is that the entire emotional world directly engages the rhythmic organization, in the broader sense as I characterized it yesterday. And the nervous system serves only to mediate our feelings so that we can have ideas and thoughts about them. So the emotional impulses directly engage the breathing and blood circulation. The nerves are the organic mediators only for what we have as perceptions of our feelings. And just as the human being's emotional world intervenes in the rhythmic system, so the will intervenes directly and completely in the metabolic-motor system. And what we have in the nerves or through the nerves are only the perceptions of what we will, the perceptions of what we have willed.

Now you will say: that need not interest the physician any further. It is a theory about the human being, and one could disregard it in medical terms. But that is not the case at all. It is not the case when one sees the consequences for today's medical view that arise from the prejudice that the nervous system is directly associated with the entire soul life.

Today, as is well known, a distinction is made between the so-called sensitive nerves, which are said to go from the center to the senses and convey sensory perceptions, and the so-called motor nerves, which are said to have something to do with the will.

In truth, there are anatomically and physiologically metamorphosed nerves, but there is only one kind of nerve. Each nerve is only a physical mediator of perception. And those nerves that we today call motor nerves are no different in function from the so-called sensitive nerves. While the sensitive nerve goes to the senses in order to perceive the outer world, the so-called motor nerve, which is also nothing other than an inner sensitive nerve, goes inward and conveys the perceptions that I have, for example, when I move a limb, that I have when I have to somehow carry out an unconscious inner movement. The nerve is only the mediator of perception for something external or internal. There are not two types of nerves, non-sensitive and motor nerves. For my part, the terminology is then unimportant to me, whether they are then called sensitive or motor, that is unimportant, but there is only one type and anatomically and physiologically something metamorphoses, there is only one type of nerve.

Of course I know that obvious objections can be raised against this view. But since I have been working on the development of this view of man for thirty-five years, I have really carefully examined all these objections. Every single fact that can be taken from the functioning or non-functioning of the nervous system, for example in the case of tabes dorsalis, every one of these facts, if it is really interpreted without prejudice, fits into the theoretical system that I have just explained to you. If you take today's interpretation of, say, tabes dorsalis, you will see contradictions everywhere. You can only come to terms with it if you know that there is only one kind of nerve and that the emotional world is not directly but only indirectly connected with the nervous system, that the emotional world directly influences the respiratory and circulatory systems and circulatory systems, and in the rhythmic system in general, that the will acts directly as a kind of metabolism, that unconscious will within us that underlies the overall metabolic process and which in turn metamorphoses into the conscious will that underlies the external conscious movements.

This was the first, I might say, the most overwhelming result that I have actually had for thirty years from the insights I have been able to gain about man. I did not dare to express it until 1917, because it is actually relatively easy to express any scientific result that differs little from the habits. On the other hand, it is really not easy, I might say, to go against the judgment, which seems so well-founded that there are two kinds of nerves, to proceed somehow in the world. And only when I could be certain that there is no scientific fact today that would contradict this, that could not be categorized within this view of the uniformity of the nerves, did I dare to express it in 1917, after three years of working on the development of this view.

But this view has a completely different consequence. Take just this fact: that the emotional impulses directly intervene in the rhythmic system, the will impulses directly intervene in the metabolic-movement system, then you have in the will system and in that which then further affiliated to the will system, in the human being's feeling system, we can only grasp this in a spiritual way, in that we can only grasp feelings as spiritual entities. And in these you have the impulses for, for example, circulation. And you get away from something that is really not easy to get away from.

Today, physiology, on which our entire medical way of thinking is based, seeks the actual motor for blood circulation in the heart, and the heart is seen as the organ that sends out the impulses to drive the blood through the organism. The opposite is true. The blood is moved through the organism by the spiritual being of the person, which directly engages the metabolism through the will organization, the circulation through the feeling impulses, and the breathing through the rhythmic system. This entire inner movement, this entire inner rhythmic activity comes directly from the spiritual being, and the heart, the activity of the heart is not the cause of the blood circulation, but it is the result of the blood circulation, the result of the movement of the fluids. The heart actually only expresses itself in its own movements, as it is inwardly stimulated and moved by the movement that actually comes from the spiritual being.

These are two things that must gradually be laid at the foundation of medicine as the basis of physiology: the view of the uniformity of the nerves and of the fact that the entire nervous life is only related to the life of the mind, and then, on the other hand, the movement of the liquid and air-shaped elements in the human being directly from the spiritual, so that the movement of the heart appears as a consequence of the rhythmic movement in the human being, not as its cause.

I still vividly remember the wild passions that I once aroused in a railway carriage on the line between Trälleborg and Stockholm when I expounded this heart theory to a Swedish doctor. The man was plunged into a terrible turmoil of passions. I can well understand how these things fit into what we are accustomed to thinking. But only in this way does one open the door from the physical human being to the spiritual human being. For in the moment when you have two kinds of nerves, one kind of nerve goes from sensory perception to the center, as a physical organization from the sense to the center. From the center the will nerve goes. The motor nerve also materially transmits that which now appears as will. You do not get out of the material at all. By constructing two kinds of nerves that do not exist — there is only one kind of nerve — you have closed the door to the spiritual in man. And that is what the admirable natural science, which is so great for the outer man, has brought for the human being. It has gone so far as to replace reality with a purely imagined theory, the purely imagined theory that there are two kinds of nerves, while the motor nerves are also sensitive nerves and are only there to perceive the inner movements. On the other hand, it makes the heart into a kind of pump, a physical apparatus that causes the rhythmic circulation of the human being through a kind of automatism. Then it deletes itself by transferring the entire cause of the rhythmic movements of the human being into this physical automaton, the heart, erasing the connection between the rhythmic system and also between the metabolic system and the spiritual essence of the human being.

This has been the shutting of the gate to the spiritual man, to the spiritual essence of man, that on the one hand the theory of the twofold nerves has been established, and on the other hand the heart theory, which does not allow the heart to be what it is, but makes it a physical motor for blood circulation, while in truth it is only the expression of the blood that is really moved by the spiritual human being.

This has significant consequences. Because only by seeing in this way, how the nervous organization is actually incorporated into the human being, can you relate the nervous organization in the right way, let us say, for example, in relation to the organization of the digestive system. The digestive system belongs to the system of the human being, which I have called the metabolic-movement system, and the nervous system is polar opposite to it.

Now let us look at the human being in relation to the one and the other system. In relation to the metabolic system: external substances are absorbed. The essential thing for the digestive system is the activity that is now triggered when external substances are introduced into the body. What the human organism is compelled to do because a foreign body enters it, which it has to transform, which it has to metamorphose, what the human being must therefore do: that is what is important, that is what this process comes down to in digestion, and this process stops at a certain stage. At the moment when this process, which initially progresses, comes to a standstill in the process of overcoming the forces of the external food, the impulse of excretion occurs. And the excretion occurs here in relation to the metabolic system in such a way that this excretion takes place directly outwards. We must therefore understand the metabolic-movement system in such a way that, firstly, the impulses of the human organism that are related to the will, the will directly intervenes in the metabolism, that these impulses, which are related to the will, the overcoming, the constitution of matter as it is outside, push it to such an extent that it reaches a certain point. Then it is excreted, excreted in all the ways that are known. But the excretion takes place outwards.

But that part of the digestive activity that is driven by the whole organic process into the head organization, that is, into the organization where the nerve-sense system is not exclusively, but preferably localized, not only goes only to this point in the human organism, to which the process goes in the metabolism-movement system, but what digestion is for the head organization is carried further, in that excretion no longer takes place externally, but internally. And what is the result of this internal elimination, which is deposited in the human being itself? That is the nervous system. The nervous system is the system in the human organism that actually owes its substantial content to an internal elimination, but which remains in the organism, is not expelled outward, and of course only remains in the organism up to a certain point, and there, through the plastic plastic forces of the first invisible entity of the human being, the first supersensible entity of the human being, the so-called etheric or life body, through the plastic forces, through the formative forces of this etheric or life body.

So that one has to distinguish, in addition to the physical body of the human being, this first supersensible entity, the etheric or life body, which is actually only dynamic, not material, only dynamic. These dynamic effects are present throughout the world in the same way, in the human being in a special way.

This formative body contains the formative forces that now shape those excretion products into the wonderfully constructed brain, indeed into the wonderfully constructed nervous system.

Dear attendees, I call upon you to examine without prejudice everything that can be said histologically, embryologically, or in terms of developmental history or evolution about the description, I mean, for example, of an embryonic cell and a nerve cell, to examine all this without prejudice and you will find that it cannot be in agreement with any other theoretical basis than the one I have just discussed.

And so one can really be, I would say, a very conscientious skeptic about what spiritual research, which I represent, says otherwise. It says that one can come to a kind of exact clairvoyance, an exact examination of this supersensible. I have described how to examine the supersensible exactly in my book, which has been translated into English as Initiation. It is precisely through such investigations of the supersensible that one comes to the conclusion that what no longer follows the physical laws of nature, but is actually a kind of artistic activity in nature, that one pursues these plastic, these plasticizing forces, which are primarily active in the human head organism, and which form those material entities in this head organism that would otherwise be driven outwards as excretory impulses.

So the strange thing that emerges from this approach is that we actually see a sum of degradation processes in our nervous system, and that the function of our nervous system actually consists of nothing more than degradation processes, because it is excretion that has been driven beyond a certain point and is plastically formed matter that has been formed after excretion.

This gives the fundamental difference between an organ that belongs to the nerve-sense organization and an organ that belongs to the digestive organization. An organ that belongs to the nerve-sense organization is much more advanced in evolution, is in a descending evolution. An organ that belongs to the metabolic-limb organization is only in an ascending evolution, goes to a certain point and from that point on promotes excretion.

These are the things that show us what the organs are like in their healthy state, but they are also the basic conditions for recognizing how the organs behave in their diseased state. And finally, these are the foundations that lead to the realization of the remedies in their connection with the disease process in reality. Let us make this clear with an example.

The process that takes place in our brain or, one could say, in the entire nervous system, this process, which develops matter up to a certain point, then breaks it down and in turn forms the breakdown products, so to speak the impoverished products, this process takes place in our nervous system. And this process of degradation, not assimilation, this process of dissimilation, not assimilation, this process of degradation, is the basis of our ideas. Our ideas are actually based on the fact that, with regard to our nervous system, we undergo a kind of atomic dying in every moment of our lives, which is only ever suspended by the building processes. One might say that in the moment of dying, everything that is distributed throughout a person's entire life on earth is compressed in the ongoing process of decomposition of the nervous system.

If one can study these processes, whereby one is dealing with a functioning of material forces up to a certain point, then with a breakdown, then one says the following: How do we actually think as human beings? How are we spiritual beings? Through the same forces through which we, say, enter into life through embryonic development? Not at all! Our physical system cannot develop in a straight line in order for us to be human, but from a certain point on it must undergo a living development, a devolution must occur. And it is in this devolution, not in evolution, that the basis is given for our spiritual activities.

Consider the consequences of such a view. It is believed that something like the nervous process is an ascending process, and as such, as an ascending process, like the growth process or like the nutrition process, it is the basis of thinking, of imagining. That is not possible at all. The basis of imagination is a process of decomposition. Matter must first be destroyed and the products of destruction must be formed plastically so that they can provide the basis for the functioning of the spiritual in us, for thoughts. We must first destroy our material basis; we must, so to speak, first make holes in the brain so that we can think. So it is not that the ability to think is based on the organic forces of growth, but rather that in order for the spirit to move into our organization, it is necessary that this organization first undergo a process of degradation, a process of destruction, a partial killing process.

Then, when you see this clearly, you come to the conclusion that here is a road, it has rained, it has a soft ground, cars drive over it; I see the ruts. But let us now assume that some being came down from Mars, had never seen a car, the cars were gone, and it only saw the ruts. He examines the furrows, goes into the earth and says: Below the surface of the earth, in the interior of the earth, there are forces that have made the furrows from below. — We cannot blame the being for seeking the reasons for the furrows in the earth's interior, only they do not lie therein, but in the wagons that have driven over them and made the furrows.

It is more or less the same with our brain. You believe that this is an organizational process of our organs outwards; while the furrows of our brain are diggings of mental and spiritual life. And we now come to the conclusion that we only use our physical body in relation to its nervous-sensory organization as the counterforce, as the resisting force, in order to carry out spiritual activity. Just as you can trace every track of the car up there that has driven here or there – and you can deduce a lot from it, there is always a trace of something the car has done – so you can, of course, explain all thinking from the brain. That is precisely the wonderful illusion of materialism: one should not say that one should not explain it from the brain; on the contrary, one can explain all thinking and the life of imagination from the brain, but because it is buried by the spiritual life.

If you follow this process, which is a process of decomposition, and then go from the human being out into the great cosmic process, you have the same processes out there. And you have the process that takes place in man today, but only remains - if I may express it this way - in the status nascendi, in the moment of its origin, this process, which takes place in the degradation of the material underlying the nervous system, this process, which is only arrested in the status nascendi, you have it cosmically present in nature in the formation of silicic acid, everywhere it occurs in nature. Therefore, if you prepare a remedy from silicic acid in the right way, which presents the same process out in the cosmos, only that there the process continues and then comes to a halt at a later point, while in the human head it is suspended in the nascency state, if you out there in the corresponding way for the preparation and administer it to the person in the appropriate way, then you take this process away from a body that has become weak in its etheric body in such a way that it cannot carry out this process, through the remedy. Now, the remarkable thing about silicic acid is that when we bring it through the substances we add to it and through the processes by which we process it, when we bring it to the head in the entire human organizational process, it can actually take from the human being that which he cannot do through his inner organizational powers because of an organic weakening.

So you are looking directly at what is going on in the human head. But you have to see the human head in connection with the spiritual impulses. And you look at what is going on outside in the cosmos in the formation of silicic acid, and you recognize that in the silicic acid process, fixed in silicon, in Silicea, you have something that you can organize into the human being, thereby relieving him of what he cannot do without it. But in so doing, you call upon the innermost organization of the person, so that it can do on its own what has been taken from it for a period of time.

Thus, spiritual insight reveals what function silicic acid actually performs in the human organism when the organism itself cannot perform this function. This is the fundamental insight that arises when one sees through the entire human organization and also its connection with external nature. One need only ask: What does not happen in any part of the human organism and what should happen?

If you then know from nature what the process is that is missing in that part of the human organism, pathology is immediately the real basis of therapy. And answering each question in the pathology correctly is immediately the therapeutic answer.

This is what the possibility of proceeding in such a way means that one says: Now, I am producing a remedy. By seeing the context, I can predict how the remedy will work. If it actually works that way, then it is a verification, not mere empiricism, but a verification.

Look everywhere to see how the external sciences do it. If one is able to predict what should happen through some theoretical view, then one does not look at the multitude of cases that verify, but if one sets up the conditions correctly and what was predicted comes true, then one initially considers what one assumed to be verified. And particularly in practical work it is important that such a verification occurs, because practice in this field always shows whether our predictions are right or not. So what can be achieved by directing human knowledge from mere physical nature to spiritual nature is that we learn to foresee the processes we observe in pathology in a therapeutic treatment in the same way that we would otherwise foresee an external natural process in the laboratory or in a physics cabinet. If it occurs as we have predicted, then we have understood the matter. Thus, we extend what is truly scientific in the way we are accustomed to doing in physics, while in the biological sciences, and especially in their practical therapeutic application, we can clearly see today that a mere empiricist method is at work. It is therefore not a matter of having less science, but of having more science in order to arrive at a truly rational, that is, also transparent, understanding of the connection between pathology and therapy.

It is already alarmingly late. Therefore, I will be obliged to summarize some things in a shorter, final part, which may shed some light on the therapeutic side of what I have said.

If we consider this organization of the sensory nervous system, which is mainly concentrated and localized in the human head, we find, in view of what has been said, that it essentially underlies the life of thought, the life of imagination. But what is it that man calls his life of thought? It is that which plays into consciousness from the actual power of thoughts, and that which the human being actually perceives in such a way that he speaks quite instinctively and involuntarily of how the thought is not actually a reality. The thought that is experienced is powerless. The thought that is experienced is basically only present in an imagistic existence.

On the other hand, this life of thought has another side, an essentially different side, and we can, I would say, easily bring before our soul what other side this life of thought has if we merely bear in mind that this phenomenon, after consciousness, is not yet present in the very young child. On the other hand, the other side of this life of thought is very much present in the very young child. This is the real dynamizing, plasticizing power of the life of thought. We have one side of the life of thought, which comes to manifestation in ordinary consciousness in the forms of images, thoughts and concepts, and we have, as it were, the power of thoughts directed backwards, which is identical with the plasticizing power I mentioned earlier. So that when we look at the life of human thinking in its connection with the whole human organism, we must actually say: what we perceive and directly experience of the life of thought is like a mirror image in relation to a real object. The real thing about the life of thought is the inward-going formative forces.

And we see these inwardly active formative forces at work most powerfully in the very young child, who does not yet have a conscious life of thought. It is precisely when a person is still a child that the greatest work is being done on the development of the organ that will then become the basis of the life of imagination itself.

We dare to speak of a latent warmth and of a warmth that appears, of an appearing warmth. We know that through certain processes a bound warmth can be released, coming out of the substance in which it was bound, was latent. We dare only not yet to speak in the same way of the fact that in the child the conscious life of imagination is gradually driven out of the unconscious life of imagination, and that this unconscious life of imagination in the child works most vividly on the plastic material that has been excreted in order to bring about the nervous system through its plasticizing power. This plasticizing power then lasts for the whole human life, being strongest in childhood. And thus we see the first supersensible in man.

Supersensible are the thoughts, but they are actually only the images that are experienced; but supersensible are also the forces that now form the actual organ of thought, the forces working on the nervous system.

But one would like to say that this is only the part of the supersensible human being that is closest to the physical event, to the physical process. It is something that looks at itself, I would say, like that which stands between the physical body and the soul. But if we look at the rhythmic system, which, as I said, is directly related to the emotional life of the human being, we see something higher at work in this rhythmic system, and we see in the rhythmic system not just an etheric plastic at work, so to speak, but an etheric plastic that is ensouled. And in its innermost part, rhythm is precisely this remarkable interweaving of the process that we have seen on the one hand in the digestive-motor system, in the metabolic-motor system, where the evolution of the material process is brought to a certain point, where the material process then wants to excrete, while in the nervous process it excretes inwardly.

If we now imagine the whole process in such a way that it is, as it were, guided as a metabolic process up to a certain point, then excretion arises, but is immediately repressed, so that the whole process constantly oscillates back and forth between a metabolic process and a degrading nervous process, then you have the basic type of that rhythmic process that underlies all rhythmic processes. It is connected with an activity of the human being, of the supersensible, of the spiritual human being, which emanates from the ensouled etheric process, from the ensouled ether life, so to speak.

And if we look at breathing, at blood circulation, at something that takes place in the sphere of rhythmic processes, we have this, as it were, in contrast to the mere etheric process, higher activity of an ensouled etheric process in our rhythmic processes. These can now in turn be assessed in connection with the processes in the cosmos.

We see how, where it should not go beyond its limits, the metabolism goes beyond its limits, so that it becomes a nervous process in the wrong place, so to speak, in the wrong organ of the human being. It certainly looks fantastic, but it corresponds to reality. If, within the metabolic system, the actual metabolic system, the metabolic process leads beyond the point that I have characterized, where it should lead to excretion, and, as it were, passes over into the nerve process in the wrong place, then the disease arises, which appears in the various forms of typhoid fever. So we have to say: typhoid diseases are nervous processes occurring within the metabolic process, nervous processes that naturally only occur as processes and cannot lead to the actual formation of a nervous system. The question now is: how do we approach such a process?

Here we again look out into the cosmos, and we find in the cosmos that remarkable substance which is naturally contained in the cosmos as a process but is retained in antimony ore. Actually, the minerals, the ores, are processes that have been firmly retained.

This antimony is a remarkable mineral, a remarkable ore. It always begins to crystallize, as it were, forming shapes that are spiky, wire-shaped figures. It almost looks like a plant or moss trapped in the mineralization. But it also has other properties. If we subject this antimony to a certain electrolytic process and apply what we obtain from it to the cathode, it only needs a very light touch with a metal tip to produce a small explosion.

And again, if we cause this antimony to burn under certain circumstances, and collect the smoke on certain surfaces, we obtain the wonderful antimony mirror, a deposit of the antimony ore that has passed through a certain type of combustion process, producing smoke, and has deposited the smoke. We get, through a process to which we can subject the antimony, a kind of continuation of the process that we see in the antimony as it occurs in nature.

When we now obtain this antimony level – and the extraction of the antimony level* is something very important within our pharmaceutical laboratory – when we obtain this antimony level, we approach those forces that have a regressive effect on such processes, which lead from within the metabolic system into the nerve formation processes. I would like to say that the antimonizing forces turn this process in the metabolism, which wants to overshoot its target, back to its target. And we get a reproduction of the rhythmic process by driving back the organic process that goes too far, through the antimony that has been brought to the antimony level.

In this way, if we use this antimonizing power correctly, we can directly destroy this, I would like to say nerve-forming process at the wrong place, stop it, return it to its correct place and, by grasping the actual typhoid process, by looking at nature, we can see which process leads back this pathological process, the corresponding therapeutic process.

So that we are always able, by simply observing the pathological processes in nature, to find either the supportive or, as I said yesterday, the counteracting processes and thus in fact to bring about the remedies in a very rational way.

We can truly hope that what has already brought us success to a very great extent, but which is only now actually in its completion, namely the search for a cure for carcinomas, can also be brought to an end.

If one has to say that the metabolic process can be driven beyond its goal, so that it leads to the nervous process, so to speak, carries out the nervous process, the nerve-forming process, in the wrong place, something else can occur. Not only can the tendency to form nerves arise in the human organism in the wrong place, but the tendency to cause processes that otherwise only occur in the sensory organs can arise in the wrong place. There the metabolism is driven even further than just to the point where it wants to occur as nerve formation; there the metabolic process is driven to the tendency to form a sensory organ in the wrong place in the human organism. And this tendency underlies carcinoma.

However skeptical one may still be about this today, the more and more one proceeds, especially if one proceeds, I would say, with this guideline histologically and so on in the examination of carcinoma, one will see that carcinoma is based on a sense organ that wants to develop in the wrong place. Of course, this is very approximate and rough, but the process that should actually only be active during the formation of the sensory organ underlies it.

And now the question is: how can we drive this process back to the point where the metabolism should actually end and immediately lead not to deposition but to immediate excretion?

And here the healing process presents itself to us by using the sap of various types of Viscum, and not, as some have objected, because it is based on an amateurish idea, but on the contrary, because it is based on a real understanding of the process that actually takes place when mistletoe forms as a parasitic plant here or there, say, on one tree or another. There is something extraordinarily complicated at work here.

If we examine the process that, roughly speaking, underlies the formation of wood, the emergence of the tree from the common herbaceous plant, from the plant that is not yet lignified internally, if we can see this process of becoming a tree from the plant in the right way, then this process is cosmically a very, very strange process. We are dealing with the earth's surface when we have an ordinary herbaceous plant that has not yet become woody, that is not becoming a tree. The root actually grows intimately together with the earth's surface; it belongs, so to speak, to the earth's surface, because there is also a continuous metabolism with the earth's surface. Then the herb grows with the leaves and the flower grows out of it. It then passes into the atmospheric influences and so on.

Now, today we are looking at - I have to draw on a kind of biological geology here - the inorganic part of the earth's soil as if it were something absolute. But everything that we have as mineralized in the earth's soil is originally a secretion. If we proceed as today's geology does, then we certainly do not come to any knowledge of the earth's formative process, because we abstract out of the earth's formative process the mere mineral basis. It is as if we were to present geology today as a finished system, as if we were to present the mere human skeleton and claim that it can have an existence in itself. The human skeleton can only have an existence as a separate, I would say mineralized, entity. A skeleton cannot arise by itself. Nor can a skeleton be considered in isolation, only in connection with the human being as a whole.

Thus, what geology gives can only be considered in connection with the living organic and spiritual earth. We do not have something original in the geological formations before us, but we have something before us that is isolated. In fact, the process of coal formation is only the simplest, most elementary process of mineralization. But everything, all the slate formations, all the crystalline formations, everything is secreted, is excreted, is, so to speak, that which is mineralized out of an originally undifferentiated organic spiritual substance.

These things are so difficult to defend today because, one might say, the counter-arguments are so obvious. They are almost self-evident, the counter-arguments, and they are so easy to see through, the counter-arguments. It is actually so terribly easy today to calculate – approximately, of course, no one claims that it is certain – how many millions or hundreds of millions of years one has to go back to this or that geological formation. This is a method that seems to be extraordinarily exact, but it is a method just as if I observe the small changes my heart undergoes within a month; now I try to calculate how much that is in three years. It is exactly the same thing. I can now calculate what my heart will be like in three hundred years, and I can calculate a state in which my heart was three hundred years ago, only that I myself was not yet there! The calculation is quite correct, the conclusion is correct, impeccable logic, only it is not realistic. Likewise, the calculations of geology are flawless, completely logical, only they are not realistic, because the earth was just as little there millions of years ago as when I calculate my own formation as a physical human being three hundred years ago. The calculation is correct in geology, but the earth was just not there before these three hundred million years.

And so a higher way of looking at things must be adopted. It sees something deposited in everything that is mineral. When the plants emerge from the ground, we have the mineral. When the tree arises instead of the usual herbaceous plant, the development of the tree trunk with its lignification is a throwback, an atavism to an earlier state in which the whole earth was. So just as we have other atavistic organs, we see in the development of the tree an atavism to an earlier state of the earth.

If now Viscum grows on the tree, then we have something growing inside the soil that is not the immediate soil, because that is a late product, it is a product of deposition, a product of separation. Instead, in the Viscum we have something that grows in an earlier state of the earth. But then again, if we pursue the matter further, we must also find that man has taken up the tendency to form a sense in his evolution last. We find that by observing the mistletoe formation process, we find a process from a very early period of the earth.

If we introduce this process into the human organism, namely by injecting it directly into the circulation process, then we transport the person to an earlier stage of their existence on earth, of their evolution, and in this way we work against these processes, which are the latest processes.

However, it must be quite clear that these are first of all the abstract thought-constructions or at the most also the abstract constructions of clairvoyant seeing. It is seeing, but it is not yet complete overview.

If we take directly what is active in mistletoe in the mistletoe process and introduce it to human beings, it changes too much, as I said yesterday for other things. And so we are now trying to process what is alive in the mistletoe formation process using a very complicated machine that develops a centrifugal and a radial force, develops a centrifugal force at a tremendous speed. The construction was not that easy. So that one can actually transform that which is effective in the mistletoe process into a completely different aggregate process and thereby use the tendencies in the mistletoe-forming force in a more concentrated way than it appears today, when the mistletoe process is a decadent process.

And so we will try to make more and more progress with this anti-carcinogenic agent in particular, which has already been developed to a certain degree of perfection and has also already produced certain results. However, it will only be fully developed and can only be given its final verification when this, I would like to say, laboratory process with the centrifuge – it is now ready – is fully developed to its end. And in this way, too, we will try to get at the carcinoma disease in an ever better way.

In a similar way, we are trying to get at the tuberculosis processes, the various organ processes, and so on, with our various means – the time has gone too far for me to explain this in more detail, but I will discuss the principles. We use the remedies in different ways, as I have already indicated, by introducing them directly into the metabolic system or by injecting them into the circulatory system, where they act differently again, or by adding them to baths and the like, where they act more on the sensory process from the outside.

We also use, for example, so-called eurythmy therapy, where we allow movements that lie within the human organism to be carried out. If you look at a human hand without prejudice, you will never say that this human hand can ever be at rest; the shape of the hand itself is only the movement that has been held. The hand is movement. In fact, every human limb is designed for movement. If I carry out the individual movements that correspond to its formal qualities, I may be able to use the movement to have a healing effect on the formal qualities. This is the kind of eurythmy therapy that is related to artistic eurythmy, an artistic presentation of which will take place tomorrow at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. But this eurythmy is thoroughly developed in the physiological sense in eurythmy therapy. Such eurythmy therapy in turn leads to what I would now like to call the external therapeutic measures practised in the Clinical Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim.

And so it is precisely in this Clinical Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim, which, as I mentioned yesterday, is under the excellent direction of Dr. Wegman, who is present here today, that we are trying to use everything that can be known about the spiritual human being, in addition to what science currently knows about the physical human being, for therapy in a rational sense.

And for this we had to incorporate the Clinical Pharmaceutical Laboratory into the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim, so that it can produce remedies in the same way as they arise from a true knowledge of the human being.

Now, I have tried, as best I could, to give a few brief aphorisms to show how, in this way, I do not want to oppose modern medicine, as I said, but how this medicine, in an equally scientific sense as it works in its present field, can be further extended into those areas of the human organism where the spiritual intervenes in this human organism. And the irregularity that arises as a form of illness through the incorrect intervention of the spiritual, through the intervention of the unconscious spiritual that does not correspond to the organism, must also be included in the thinking that must be total medical thinking. Little by little, medical thinking must come to see in man not only a physical being, not only physical processes in his activities, but purely physical processes only in one part of the human being, and in the far greater part of the human organism, to see something in the human organism in which the spiritual directly intervenes, which the human being has in him from the spiritual world just as he takes his material from the physical material world in the form of food and other things. Only then, when the whole human being is looked at in this way in a physiological sense, will it also be possible to look at the whole human being in a pathological sense. But this holistic view of the human being in its pathological context, inseparably linked with pathology, provides a real therapy, because one gets to know the relationship between the human being and his cosmic environment, and one can then find the healing remedies from the cosmic environment not just through empirical trial and error, but through a proper insight and understanding of the connection between the human being and the cosmos. This will create a form of therapy that will not have an abyss between itself and the pathology, but will form a whole with the pathology.

And that was what many physicians longed for in the anthroposophical movement and which this detailed approach, I might say, within this spiritual-scientific movement, which has made its mark in the field of medicine, was intended to remedy.

I hope my aphoristic remarks have not become too unclear. But when one has to present something briefly, one still wants to present the overarching principles. Sometimes the individual suffers as a result. But hopefully I have at least been able to provide some individual inspiration in these remarks.