An Outline of Anthroposophical Medical Research

GA 319 — 28 August 1924, London

Tenth Lecture

First of all, I would like to express my sincere thanks to Mrs. Larkins and Dr. Larkins for allowing me to repeat what I was able to do last year and I would like to present some ideas about medicine, about sick human beings in contrast to healthy ones, and about healing methods derived from the anthroposophical worldview and research methods.

If I may say a few introductory words, it should be this above all: what anthroposophy, as it is meant here, has to add to individual branches of life, for example to medicine, is not in any way intended to contradict what is today considered to be the scientific view of medicine. When speaking from such a perspective, as I will do this evening and tomorrow evening, it is very easy to be misunderstood, because today's prevailing view is that anything that is not limited to what is considered to be precisely established is sectarian, something that cannot be taken seriously in a scientific sense. Therefore, I would like to note from the outset that the very view that seeks to base medicine on anthroposophy is not only full of appreciation but also full of understanding for everything that has been achieved in the medical field in recent times that is significant and great. And there can be no question of any kind of amateurish or lay polemic with what I am about to say against what is today recognized as medical treatment or the like. It is simply a matter of the fact that, over the course of the last few centuries, our entire worldview has taken on a form that limits research to what can be established through the senses, either through experimentation or direct observation, and to what the human mind can then combine on the basis of what is seen by the senses.

This way of researching was entirely justified for centuries. For if humanity had continued along the old paths, it would have strayed completely into the realm of fantasy and dreams, arriving at arbitrary assumptions and wild hypotheses. But it is true that human beings, as they exist in the world between birth and death, are not beings that can truly be understood through the senses and the mind; that human beings have a real supersensible part just as they have a real sensory part.

And when we speak of healthy and sick people, we cannot help but ask ourselves the question: Can health and sickness really be recognized in the way that is desired today, through the investigation of the physical body with the help of the sensory organs, with the help of those tools that complement the senses, that lead to our experiments, and with the help of the intellect? And here a real — not a prejudiced — historical view can teach us that knowledge of human beings has come from something quite different than mere sensory observation. We have, after all, a long human development behind us, also in relation to spiritual life.

In ancient times, we can say three millennia ago, but certainly still in the time when Greek culture, ancient Greek culture, flourished, there were no schools where one learned as one learns in today's schools. In today's schools, one learns in such a way that, as a young person, one approaches university with the entire structure of one's soul already complete. One is guided through the individual scientific disciplines, for example, the discipline that prepares one for medicine, and one is expected to judge according to the state of the soul that one occupies as an eighteen-, nineteen-, or twenty-year-old.

This was not the approach to learning in earlier times. Instead, the approach to learning in earlier times was that one first had to develop forces in the soul, had to educate oneself further, had to develop further, in order to then recognize what is actually human.

Now, precisely because people in earlier times, due to their more primitive nature of soul, did not tend toward fantasy, it was possible to learn all branches of life in the so-called mysteries, based first on such spiritual training, such spiritual discipline.

This has ceased, I would say, since the founding of our universities in the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries. Since that time, we have only learned in a rationalistic way. Rationalism, which leads to sharp logic, also leads, on the other hand, to being able to see only the outer material world.

Now, over the last few centuries, modern times have produced a great wealth of external sensory truths. That cannot be denied. We even have such an extraordinarily large wealth of sensory truths in biology, physiology, and all the sciences that prepare medicine, that we have not yet gotten around to organizing all the individual observations. There is an enormous amount in these observations from which immeasurable gains can still be made. But in recent centuries, all the views of people who believed that souls must be brought to see the supersensible have receded. This has made it virtually impossible to truly investigate the human being in terms of health and illness. To substantiate what I am saying to some extent, I would just like to point out that even today it is possible, as I have described in my books, including the book translated here under the title “Initiation,” to raise the soul to perceive the spiritual in human beings as opposed to the material, as opposed to the physical.

This spiritual aspect of the human being is just as visible to spiritual observation as the physical and material aspects are to sensory observation. However, sensory observation is organically integrated into our body without us having to do anything; spiritual observation is something we must acquire. This spiritual observation, however, cannot be brought about by all kinds of mystical, nebulous training, but can be brought about precisely by developing a strict life in thought, resting on thought within oneself. One must only methodically transform what one otherwise wants to possess as a finished product, this resting in thought, this life in thought, into soul education. If one really manages, as one otherwise experiments externally, to experiment for a while, so to speak, with the soul itself, to let the soul rest on an easily comprehensible thought, without falling into any kind of autosuggestion, any kind of drowsy consciousness, such as a hypnotic state, but if one practices in such a way that one further develops what can be retained with ordinary thinking—the prudence remains, but inwardly, spiritually, what is carried out is that outwardly, physically, the trivial becomes apparent, that if one trains a muscle continuously, it becomes stronger, you can do more with it — if you methodically exercise the soul continuously, it becomes stronger, more powerful, sees things differently.

The first thing it sees is that human beings do not in fact consist solely of this physical body, which can be examined either with the naked eye or through a microscope or in some other way, but that human beings also carry an etheric body within themselves. Do not be put off by the term “etheric body”; I could just as well have chosen another expression, but we need to have a term. So, in addition to the ordinary physical body, which is structured in such a way that it can be examined by anatomy and physiology in our present-day sense, we can also see the etheric body in human beings. This is not the same as what amateurish vitality represented in earlier scientific ages; it is something truly perceptible, truly visible. And if I were to give you a qualitative difference between this etheric body and the physical body, I would like to single out from the numerous qualitative differences that exist only this one: the physical body of the human being is subject to gravity. It tends toward the earth. The etheric body of the human being tends toward the periphery of the universe, that is, toward all sides. We usually calculate with what is heavy, because we like to use scales in our research today. But the human organism counters what is heavy with something that is not only not heavy, but which strives away from the earth, which strives against ordinary earth gravity. So we carry not only gravitational forces within us, but also forces that strive away from the earth.

This is the first supersensible body. I could name many other etheric characteristics for this first supersensible body, but I will limit myself to this. We have, so to speak, a first human being within us, the physical human being, who is centripetally oriented in relation to the earth, striving toward the earth; we have a second human being who is centrifugally oriented, striving away from the earth. We have the actual life given to us by the fact that a balance must be maintained between these two configurations of the human being, the heavy physical body subject to gravity and the etheric body striving toward all sides of the universe, which is our second organization.

Now just take this configuration of the forces of the physical body, the etheric body. You can say to yourself: the etheric body strives in all directions; in a sense, it always wants to become as large as the universe. The physical body is subject to gravity, to heaviness. It strives toward the center of the earth. It rounds off the etheric body so that the etheric body imitates the universe, the cosmos, but is initially held within its limits by the physical body. And only in this way do we gain a true, penetrating, real insight into the human being when we consider the balance between the physical body and the etheric body.

Now let's continue! Once we have a real concept of these centrifugal forces striving away from the earth, we also see these centrifugal forces in plants. Only minerals are physical for us. We find nothing of centrifugal forces in them. Minerals are purely subject to gravity. In plants, we also find their external form as a result of the two forces. But we also realize that we cannot stop at these two configurations if we want to consider organisms higher than plants, because plants have their etheric body; animals, when we consider them, have life within them, which we call sensation. They create a world within themselves. This makes us aware that we should continue our research.

Now we can actually develop human consciousness further. It is already a development of consciousness when we come to see not only the physical body of the human being, but also this physical body embedded as if in a cloud in the etheric body.

But that is not all there is to human beings; rather, just as we strengthen an arm muscle by continuously exerting force on it, we can now strengthen and fortify our soul so that it has, so to speak, more and more reality in its thoughts. Then we can move on to the other thing, which is now difficult, not so easy; we can move on to suppressing these thoughts, which are then strong within us because we have strengthened them.

If, in ordinary consciousness, one gradually extinguishes the senses of sight, hearing, and thinking, the person falls asleep—an easy experiment to perform. But if you have strengthened the soul in this way, as I have described, through training your thinking, through training your entire life of imagination and feeling, then you can suppress this life of feeling. For above all, you come to a state in which you are not asleep, in which you are very awake. One must even be careful not to lose sleep when developing this state. But if one proceeds as I have described in my books, all precautions are taken to ensure that one does not experience disturbances in one's life. One becomes quite awake, but no longer sees or hears what the senses otherwise perceive. You also reach a point where you can remove your ordinary memory. You stand before the world with an empty but completely alert consciousness.

Then one sees a third organism in the human being, which I call — don't be put off by the term — the astral organism. Animals also have this. It is what gives human beings the ability not only to have an etheric body with forces that strive away from the earth, but also to develop a real inner life, to develop feeling. This is something that is connected neither with the depths of the earth nor with the vastness of the universe, but rather with an inner permeation with forces that can be seen as the astral body. This is a third member of the human organization. I will speak about a fourth member later. I would now like to say the following about this third member.

If you get to know this third member of the human organism in the way I have indicated, it is scientifically something tremendously enlightening, because when you get to know it, it is suddenly as if the scales have fallen from your eyes. For before that, when you really think about human growth in an unbiased way, you say to yourself: nothing but impossibilities! — You see human beings growing from childhood; their vital forces are active; human beings are constantly growing. But they don't just grow, they develop consciousness, they develop an inner reflection of the outer world, they develop consciousness. Can that come from growth? Can that come from the same forces that underlie nutrition, that underlie growth?

Yes, when the organ forces that underlie nutrition and growth gain the upper hand in us, consciousness becomes clouded. So if there is anything in us that represents a hypertrophy of the forces of growth, anything that overwhelms us, that represents the forces of nutrition, consciousness is immediately clouded. We need something that does not coincide with these growth and nourishment forces, but rather works directly against them. Human beings grow continuously and nourish themselves continuously; but in our astral body, as I have just described, we have something that continuously suppresses and breaks down growth and nourishment.

So in human beings we have building up through the physical body in connection with the earth, building up in the etheric body in connection with the cosmos, and breaking down in the astral body, constant breaking down. The astral body constantly breaks down the organic processes, breaks down cell life, glandular life, breaks down.

This is the secret of human organization. Now we understand why human beings have a soul. If human beings grew continuously like plants, they could not have a soul. The growth processes must first be broken down; they drive away the soul. If we constantly had growth and building processes in our brain, rather than breakdown and destruction processes, we could not receive a soul. Evolution excludes all linearity. Evolution must go backwards in one direction. Space must be made again, broken down. That is the secret of the human being, of every animated being.

Today I would like to present, I would like to say, the spiritual-physiological, spiritual-biological, and then tomorrow move on to the description of individual diseases and their healing processes. That is why I wanted to begin with this discussion first and will allow myself to continue when this part has been translated.

As long as we remain with the animal organization, we are dealing with these three organizations: the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body. The moment we approach the human being, we find, if we continue with the same inner soul training, that we have before us another link in the organization for spiritual perception.

When we penetrate the animal with spiritual perception, we find in the animal, as it were, neutralized with each other, not clearly separated from each other: thinking, feeling, willing. In animals, when we see through them, we cannot speak of separate thinking, feeling, and willing, only of a neutral mixture of these three elements. In humans, inner life is based precisely on the fact that they can grasp their intentions in calm thinking, can even pause at these calm intentions, can carry them out, or not carry them out. When an animal has an impulse, it carries it out. Humans separate thinking, feeling, and willing. How this comes about can only be understood by continuing the inner spiritual observation to the fourth human member, the ego organization, so that we distinguish in humans between the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, which humans still share with animals, and the actual ego organization.

We have just placed before our souls the fact that the astral body breaks down the processes of growth, continually accumulates the processes of nutrition, and, in a sense, incorporates a slow dying into the human organism. The ego organization now rescues certain elements from this breakdown, and from what has already been broken down by the astral body, I would say, the substances falling out of the etheric body and the physical body, which are already in the process of breakdown, the ego organization builds up again. That is actually the secret of human nature.

When we look at the human brain, we see in the bright areas, in the areas of the brain that lie more beneath the surface, the areas that emanate from the senses as nerve strands, a very complicated organization, but an organization that, for those who can see through it, is in the process of decay, in fact in continuous decay, even if the decay is very slow, so that it cannot be traced with crude physiology. But from all this, the peripheral brain, which actually underlies the human organization, is built up in the human being, who is thus distinguished from the animal. In relation to the human structure, the central brain, the continuation of the sensory nerves and their connections, is actually more perfect. The outer brain, which underlies the ordinary human organization, is actually even more closely related to metabolism than the deeper parts of the brain. But this peripheral brain, which is peculiar to humans, the actual frontal brain, is actually rescued by the ego organization from what would otherwise already be decaying. And so it is throughout the entire human organism. The ego organization rescues certain elements from the decay caused by the astral body, elements which are then used to build up what underlies the harmoniously ordered thinking, feeling, and willing of the human being.

Of course, I can only hint at these things, but I would like to point out that in the field of spiritual research we proceed just as precisely as any external science can proceed experimentally, and we also feel responsible, so that we ask ourselves at all times: Does what we find in spiritual vision correspond to the results of external empirical, physical research? — Anything else is not accepted as valid, at least in principle.

But it is precisely the structure of the brain that points us to what we then recognize through vision, through spiritual vision, through spiritual perception: that in human beings, the three members, the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body, are based on the I-organization, which in a sense rebuilds a parasite from the decay products, in a sense, brings them back to life. Thus, we have four members of the human organization. These four members of the human organization must have very specific relationships to each other in a healthy human organism.

If I were to express myself through a scientific analogy, I would say the following: We only get water when we combine hydrogen and oxygen in a certain way according to their weight ratios; in any other way, oxygen and hydrogen do not become water. Hydrogen and oxygen have a certain relationship to each other. If this relationship is fulfilled, water is created.

Similarly, the human being exists when there is a normal relationship — if I may use this expression — between the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the ego organization. We have not only four, but four times four relationships. All of them can be disturbed. The etheric body can predominate, because the living differs from the dead in that there is a balance, but this balance is unstable. Water simply does not arise if the relationship between hydrogen and oxygen is not there. In the human organism, however, an abnormal relationship can arise between the etheric body and the physical body, or between the astral body and the etheric body, or between the ego organization and one of these members. They are all connected to each other and have certain relationships with each other. If they are disturbed, we have a sick organism before us.

Now, however, this relationship, which can be understood, is not uniform throughout the whole human being, but is different for each human organ. If we consider the human lung, the physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego organization are in a different relationship in the human lung than in the brain or liver. This is precisely what makes the human being such a complex organism, in that the spiritual and the material exist in different relationships in each of his organs.

If I may dwell more on the general today – I will go into specifics tomorrow – I would like to say this about the general: there may be too much astrality present for an organ, say the liver or kidney. I would like to say that there is a certain relationship between the kidney as a physical organ, the etheric and astral bodies, and the ego organization that is suitable for a healthy human organism. The astral organization in the kidney can predominate; it can be too strong. It can also be too weak. Both mean kidney disease.

However, the same thing, the astral organization being too weak or too strong, is different in another organ. You can see from this that just as the physical anatomist and physiologist studies the human organism according to its external physical characteristics, so too, once this general spiritual vision has been accepted and practiced, the human organization must be studied and the health and disease of each organ must be observed and recognized. In this way, one gradually arrives at a complete, total understanding of the human organism. One does not understand the human organism if one knows it only in terms of its physical organization. One only understands it when one recognizes it in terms of these four members mentioned above. And one can only understand the nature of a disease when one can say how, in the human organism, any of the four elements mentioned either predominates too strongly or recedes too much. By directing one's spiritual gaze to these things, one actually arrives at a diagnosis that is spiritual as well as material. And in the field of anthroposophic medicine, which is being worked on, no remedy that conventional medicine has is neglected; that is out of the question. On the contrary, to all this is added what is made possible by this insight into the human organism according to its four elements in the assessment of the healthy or sick person.

In addition, however, it is also possible to have a spiritual view not only of the human being, in relation to the human being, but also to have this spiritual view in relation to the whole of nature, that is, to understand the whole of nature not only physically, but also spiritually. This, in turn, enables us to find the relationship between human beings and nature, and in medicine in particular, the relationship between human beings and remedies.

Let us consider one example. A very common substance in the Earth's organization is silicic acid. Silicic acid is contained in the beautiful quartz crystals that are so widespread on Earth, but it is also finely distributed in the air. Twenty-eight percent of the total substance on the Earth's surface is silicic acid, forty-eight percent is oxygen. So silicic acid is hardly less abundant than oxygen on Earth. Silicic acid forms the beautiful bright six-sided prisms, six-sided pyramids. We find them in our mountains and place them in our rooms as special pieces that we admire among our minerals.

This silicic acid is an infinitely important component of our Earth. But for those who, as I have indicated, can also see through things spiritually, everything that is represented in all quartz, in all siliceous matter, is at the same time the outer manifestation of a spiritual being.

This makes people today even more rebellious than when you talk to them about the spirit in human beings. In human beings, they sometimes tolerate it. But when you talk to them about nature, that wherever there is a natural being, there is also spirit within that natural being, they will not tolerate it! For they want to be satisfied with physical nature everywhere. But that is not the case. There is a huge difference between having silica among us and seeing through it spiritually, for example quartz crystal or even very fine silica, and seeing through carbon dioxide with a trained consciousness. Today, we are accustomed to accepting the usual physical characteristics: carbon dioxide is carbon and oxygen; silicic acid is silicon and oxygen, and we judge oxygen and silicon according to the properties they exhibit in the retort, which can otherwise be observed in reactions in the chemical laboratory. The same applies to carbon and oxygen.

But to all this is added the spiritual. And it is now the case that with everything silicic, with everything that is like quartz in its solid state, the rock crystal that we find out in our high mountains, with all of this it is the case that this substance, this siliceous substance, gives free passage to everything spiritual. The silicic acid substance always allows everything spiritual in the world, everything that weaves and lives in the world, to pass through it.

That is the remarkable thing when you have a quartz crystal in front of you: it is like a transit station for the spiritual. Twenty-eight percent of the total substance around the earth is silicic acid, and everything that is in the silicic acid process allows the spiritual to pass through, just as light passes through something transparent. But rock crystal quartz also occurs in the so-called opaque form as so-called smoky topaz; even though light does not pass through it, everything spiritual passes through it.

So in nature we are dealing with substances that are simply permeable to the spirit. They are carriers of the spirit. The spirit is in them, they absorb it everywhere, yet hold it back nowhere. They are the true transit stations for the spirit.

While substances such as silicic acid behave in this way toward the spiritual, carbonic acid is quite different. Carbonic acid has the peculiarity—and this is true of everything physical, including the spiritual—that when the spiritual enters carbonic acid, it becomes individualized within it. Carbon dioxide wants to hold on to everything spiritual with all its might. The spiritual itself chooses carbon dioxide to dwell within. When the spiritual enters the siliceous, it wants to go further, to savor everything siliceous. When it comes into contact with carbon dioxide, it wants to stay inside. It feels extremely at home in the place where it has grasped the carbon dioxide.

The following is based on this: In animals, we have respiration, blood circulation, and the carbon dioxide process. It is primarily connected to the astral body. The astral body works; it works continuously in the carbon dioxide process. The carbon dioxide process is the external physical aspect of the animal, while the astral body is the internal spiritual aspect. The spiritual is the astral body; its physical counterpart is the carbon dioxide process, which underlies exhalation.

The ego organization is the spiritual inner self. We have silicic acid in our hair, in our bones, in our sensory organs; we have silicic acid distributed throughout the entire periphery of the body. Wherever the human being comes into contact with the forces of the outside world, there is silicic acid. This silicic acid is the external correlate, the outward activity of the ego organization. Astral body: the inner spiritual; carbonic acid process: the outer physical. Silicic acid process: the outer physical; ego organization: the inner.

Now consider that the ego organization must be strong enough in a certain way to process and control all the silicic acid process that is within it. If the ego organization is too weak, the silicic acid process physically falls out: a disease process. The astral body must be strong enough to control the carbonic acid process; if it is too weak for this, carbonic acid or its decay products fall out: the onset of disease.

By getting to know the strong or weak astral body, one looks precisely at the spiritual cause of the disease. By getting to know the ego organization, we see the cause of all those diseases that either cause an incorrect silicic acid decay in the body or that must somehow — we will talk about this tomorrow — be treated therapeutically through a silicic acid process. But what emerges from this is the following.

With mere physical science, one can administer silicic acid as a remedy in some processed form. This does exist, of course; although silicic acid is used less frequently in modern medicine, it is still used. But one thinks only of what the chemist thinks, of this compound of silica and oxygen, SiO. One thinks only of that. In truth, however, when one administers silicic acid, one is administering an external material substance that does not hold the spirit together, but only allows it to pass through. One must be aware of this. If one administers silicic acid to a person as a remedy, one must formulate the preparation in such a way that the spirit is contained within it in the right way.

With remedies that contain carbonic acid, one must be aware that the astral body is at work within them.

It is therefore possible to conceive of a therapy that does not merely work with chemical agents and chemical forces, but administers a remedy with full consciousness: Just as you administer a dose of physical substance, or bathe or inject a certain percentage solution of physical substance, so you inject the spiritual into the human organism in a very specific way with the specific substance.

So it is entirely possible to make the transition to recognizing not only the physical substance in the remedy, but also what acts as the spiritual element in the remedy. This is what was characteristic of ancient medicine, and the traditions of which still exist, especially in the important remedies still used today.

This is what we must return to. And we can do so if, without neglecting physical medicine, we add spiritual knowledge to the physical, both of human beings and of nature. We can proceed just as precisely as we do in physical science.

This is precisely what anthroposophy does not want to correct in conventional medicine, but simply, because it sees that conventional medicine everywhere actually demands this of itself, wants to add it to conventional medicine. You will be convinced of this when the book is published shortly, which is, so to speak, the first treatment of this subject, which is now in print and will present the first elements. Of course, things will only be worked out slowly, and it will take a long time before the first elements that are now available can be shaped into such a beautiful, complete system as today's medicine represents in all its aspects, But the path must be taken, and it will be taken, and the first product to appear in this direction is the book that has been written in collaboration between myself and my dear friend and colleague in the medical and other spiritual-scientific fields, in the entire field of spiritual science, Dr. Ita Wegman, who heads the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute at the Goetheanum. What will be presented in this book, at least as a beginning — the first volume is currently in print — represents one beginning. There will be sequels, because what I am hinting at is the beginning of an extensive spiritual knowledge that humanity still has little faith in today, and one can understand why it still has little faith in it. But the fact that successes can ultimately be achieved in the field of medicine can already be studied in practice at Dr. Wegman's Clinical Institute. And it is my conviction that those personalities who approach this continuation and complementation of medicine without prejudice, with the same goodwill with which one otherwise approaches physical medicine, will have no difficulty at all in finding access to this spiritual understanding of the human being and the spiritual understanding of a certain method of healing.

I have tried to indicate only the principles. I am well aware that little can be gained from such hints; nevertheless, I would like to begin the third part today by showing, after this part has been translated, how such premises can in principle be used to gain insight into certain disease processes and thus provide a foundation for moving from pathology to therapy.

I would like to take the liberty of briefly showing, with two examples, the spiritual practical application of what I have described. Based on what has been said, let us assume that somehow, before a spiritual diagnosis, if I may express it that way, it becomes apparent in a person that the etheric body is predominant somewhere, that the activity of the etheric body is too strong. So the following has occurred: we are faced with the fact that it is simply apparent that the etheric body is working too strongly in some organ. The astral body and the ego organization are not in a position to control this predominant process of the etheric body in any organ, either by breaking it down (the astral body) or by reviving it (the ego organization). So we are faced with an astral organization that has become too weak, perhaps also with an ego organization that is too weakly controlled, and the etheric body predominates. In some organ, it brings about the processes of growth and nutrition in such a way that the human organism is held together too little by the dominant astral body and the dominant ego organization.

At this point of the predominant etheric body, the human organism appears to be too strongly exposed to the centrifugal forces in the cosmos. These forces act in the etheric body. They are not in balance with the centripetal forces of the physical body. And what develops cannot be controlled by the astral body. In this case, we are faced with a predominance of the silicic acid process, with a lack of control of the silicic acid process by the ego organization.

We always see something like this in tumor formation. And in particular, this opens the way to a real understanding of carcinoma processes, cancer processes.

You will always find that very good approaches are taken in relation to research into carcinoma, cancer. It is precisely in relation to these investigations that the best successes have been achieved that can actually be achieved in the physical realm. But carcinoma cannot be understood as long as one does not know that it is a predominance of the etheric body that is not suppressed or broken down by a corresponding action of the astral body, the ego organization. And the question arises: What must be done to partially strengthen the astral organization, the ego organization, for the organ in question, so that the predominant etheric organization can be sufficiently broken down? That is the question, posed abstractly at first, which leads to the therapy of carcinoma, which I will then take the liberty of discussing tomorrow.

So here we see that understanding the etheric body opens up a way to gradually understand one of the most serious human diseases and to combat it by understanding the spiritual effects in the remedies. This is an example of where one must look at the etheric body in order to thoroughly understand the disease.

But let us assume that the astral body predominates, and indeed to such an extent that the astral body predominates throughout almost the entire organism, that we are dealing with a general, I would say, stiffening of the astral body, that the astral body develops its inner forces too strongly and actually, I would say, makes itself much more important in the organism than it should be. What is the result of this? First of all, if the astral body cannot be controlled by the ego organization, if it cannot be paralyzed in its breakdown by a revitalization process in the appropriate way, if a balance cannot be established, then phenomena occur that are always related to a weak ego organization. For if the astral body is too strong, the ego organization is relatively too weak. This is always associated with all the symptoms of illness that result from too weak an ego organization and too strong an astral organization.

This first manifests itself in abnormal heart activity. We therefore have to look for a complex of symptoms in which one component is excessive heart activity.

Furthermore, one result of relatively weak ego activity in relation to the astral body is the prominent activity of the glands. Thus, more or less peripheral glandular organs begin to develop a predominant activity because they are not sufficiently controlled by the ego organization. For example, we see the occurrence of what causes these glands here (on the neck) to swell: goiter formation occurs.

We also see how the silicic acid process, which should react from within, is pushed outwards by the stiffening astral body, how the ego organization is unable to act strongly enough, especially in the sense organs, where it should have a correspondingly strong effect. We therefore see how the eyes swell up. The astral body pushes the eyes outwards. The ego organization is there to control this outward pushing of the eyes. Our eyes are held in their proper position by the stable, unstable balance between the ego organization and the astral body. We now see the eyes protruding, as if they were about to leave the organism because the ego organization is too weak to hold them in the organism in the right way. But we also see a general restlessness, a sensitivity, a nervousness. Finally, because the ego organization cannot properly repress the organic processes caused by the astral body, we see the activity of the astral body predominating. What must happen when the ego organization is too weak and the human being is, so to speak, driven and pushed by the astral organization subordinate to his ego organization, we see insomnia, with this protrusion of the eyes, associated with abnormal glandular activity; in short, as we understand the human being, we see Graves' disease, we see Graves' disease.

If we understand this, we realize that Graves' disease is caused by an imbalance between the ego and the astral body, and then we can try to develop the appropriate therapy.

You see, things can be sought out in a precise manner, both in terms of their pathological situation and in terms of therapy, and found accordingly with the help of spiritual insight into the human being.

That is what I have taken the liberty of assuming for the time being. Tomorrow, I will take the liberty of moving on from these two examples I have given to show how such spiritual pathology also leads to such spiritual therapy. I will start from these two, I would say, characteristic clinical pictures, carcinoma and Graves' disease, in order to show from there how one can arrive at an enrichment, a complement to the therapeutic, after first creating a truly exact spiritual basis for physiology and therapy.

I will take the liberty of discussing the therapeutic approach, i.e., in relation to the two examples, tomorrow in order to provide a further picture of the therapy that can follow from this foundation.