An Outline of Anthroposophical Medical Research

GA 319 — 29 August 1924, London

Eleventh Lecture

Yesterday, I was able to talk about how, through the recognition of the supersensible nature of the human being, light can be shed on the healthy and sick state of that human being. I was able to show how the physical, etheric, astral, and ego entities in healthy human beings must have very specific relationships, which, however, do not correspond to an exact, strict equilibrium, but rather to a more unstable one. Nevertheless, the development of disease in human beings depends on a considerable deviation from the healthy relationship between these four members of human nature. And I have initially selected two examples with which I was able to show what spiritual scientific research, a spiritual view, reveals about the nature of disease from the knowledge of the etheric organism, which provides a certain insight, for example, into carcinoma, cancer, and I then pointed out how insight into the nature of the astral organism can lead to an overview of something like the complicated complex of symptoms of Graves' disease.

If we now want to move on from pathology to therapy — and we will first illustrate this with these two examples — I must first explain something fundamental in order to show how an effect is produced by the absorption of external natural substances into the human organism.

The whole relationship between so-called nature and the human organism can only be understood when one realizes that this human organism is not only a physical-soul-spiritual entity in a physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego organization, but also when one understands, as I showed yesterday with regard to silicic acid and carbonic acid, that wherever natural substances and natural processes are found, there is a spiritually tangible spirit as the basis of these natural substances and natural processes for spiritual perception. But then one must also enter into the concrete spiritual. Just as one must distinguish in the physical between a mineral and a plant, so one must also recognize in its concreteness that which the beings of the world carry within themselves as spiritual.

Of course, I can only give a summary of these things here, but I would at least like to go into the main categories. Let us first take mineral nature. We take a considerable part of our remedies from mineral nature, and even that which can be created as the spiritual basis of medicine will have to take a considerable part of its remedies from the mineral kingdom.

If we look around the entire mineral kingdom, we will find that what is present in the mineral kingdom contains the spiritual in such a bound form that there is a certain affinity between the mineral and the human ego organization, namely as follows: One might believe that if minerals are administered to humans in some way, whether by mouth or by injection, then the minerals will mainly affect the human organism and make it healthy or sick. But in reality, the physical mineral as such, the one that chemists study and physicists deal with in their thoughts, does not actually affect the human organism as a physical entity, but remains as it is. From a spiritual point of view, the physical, when transferred from the outside world into the human organism, hardly undergoes any significant metamorphosis. On the other hand, the spiritual present in the physical has a particularly strong effect on the human ego organization in minerals. So we can say that the spirit of a rock crystal, for example, has a particularly strong effect on the human ego organization. So that the ego organization of the human being, by carrying within itself, for example, the siliceous element, dominates the spiritual element of silicic acid, that is, of quartz. That is what is significant.

Let us move from the mineral to the plant. Plants not only have a physical body, they also have what I characterized yesterday as an etheric body. When we introduce plant substances to humans, whether by injection or by mouth, the plant substances generally have the effects I am about to describe. These are generalizations; there are exceptions everywhere, which can also be studied, but this is generally true. All plant substances introduced to humans have a direct effect on their astral body. All animal substances, i.e., all those essences, liquids, processed substances that we obtain from the animal kingdom and administer to the human organism, have an effect on the etheric body in the human organism.

This is particularly interesting because in the spiritually based medicine mentioned yesterday, products from the animal kingdom are already being used for certain diseases, for example the secretion of the pituitary gland, which is used successfully in rachitic children or in cases of limb deformities in childhood and the like. But it is not only this secretion; other products of the animal organism also act on the etheric body of the human being, strengthening or weakening it; in short, they have their main effect there.

That which is directly transferred from one human being to another is only significant for the physical organization of the human being. Only a purely physical effect can be considered when something is transferred from one person to another. This is very interesting. For example, when blood is transferred from one person to another, one can only expect the physical effects that blood can have on the organism.

This was particularly easy to study during the transition from smallpox vaccination with human fluid to cowpox vaccination, when it was possible to directly observe how the effect of the physical body in the former vaccine taken from humans moved up, so to speak, into the etheric body as a result of using the animal vaccine.

So we can say: if we develop spiritual vision within ourselves, we can see how nature gradually affects human beings, how human beings, through their ego organization, draw in the spirit of the mineral kingdom, how, through their astral organization, they draw in the spirit of the plant kingdom, and through their etheric organization, the spirit the spiritual of the animal kingdom, and through his physical organization, merely the physical of the human being. We can no longer speak of the spirit. Even with the animal organization, which acts on the etheric body, we can no longer really speak of the spiritual, but only of the etheric in the animal itself.

Only by coming to understand these connections can we truly grasp the whole way in which human beings, in both healthy and sick states, are placed within nature. But we also gain an inner insight into the continuing effect of the natural in the human organism. And if we then have to go further and ask: How should we behave, for example, in the case of something like carcinoma, cancer? — We saw yesterday that the etheric body develops too much power of its own at the site of some organ. The centrifugal forces, that is, the forces that want to escape into the cosmos, become too strong. The astral body and the ego organization are not able to counteract this in a sufficient manner. Now one is guided by what one has recognized spiritually. One says to oneself, now one can try: either one must strengthen the astral body, then one must turn to the plant kingdom, or one must suppress the activity of the etheric body, then one must turn to the animal kingdom.

Spiritual research has now led us to take the path that approaches the astral body in order to achieve the healing of the carcinoma, so that the astral body is strengthened in its power.

If one now wants to find a remedy for the astral body, one can only look for it in the plant kingdom. In the plant kingdom — one can now say — this remedy has indeed been found.

We have been accused of allowing all kinds of amateurish ideas to play a part in this, and so on, by using a parasitic plant, mistletoe, which is otherwise used in medicine at most for the healing of epilepsy and similar diseases, in a specially prepared form in order to embark on the path that leads to the healing of carcinoma.

But mistletoe is something very special. If you have ever looked at trees that have these strange bark growths, trunk growths like tumors, especially if you have looked at them in cross-section, on average, then you will notice that something peculiar is happening there.

The entire tendency of growth, which otherwise has a vertical direction, is deflected at a right angle at this point, taking on a horizontal direction; everything pushes outwards, as if a second trunk were growing outwards, and you end up with something that looks like a parasite extracted from the plant itself.

If you study it more closely, you will find that when the tree develops such an outgrowth, the following occurs: somehow the physical body of the tree is inhibited. There is not enough physical matter everywhere to keep up with the etheric body in its growth power. The physical body lags behind. The etheric body, which otherwise strives to centrifugalize the physical matter out into the universe, is, in a sense, left alone for a certain part when the first growth occurs here. (A drawing is made.) Too little physical matter passes through, or at least matter that has too little physical power. The result of this is that the etheric body turns downwards towards the lower part of the tree, which is equipped with greater force. So it is essentially the etheric body that becomes strong again.

Now imagine that this does not happen, but instead the parasitic mistletoe plant settles here, then a second plant, which now carries its own etheric body, does the same thing that would otherwise happen with the tree's own etheric body. This creates a very special relationship between the mistletoe and the tree. The tree, which is rooted directly in the earth, processes the forces it draws from the earth. The mistletoe, which is attached to the tree, processes what the tree gives it, using the tree as earth, so to speak. It artificially causes what, in the case of growths, is an overgrowth of the etheric organization when it occurs without the mistletoe. The mistletoe takes from the tree what it only gives when it has too little physical matter, when the etheric in it overgrows. An overgrowing etheric substance draws itself from the tree into the mistletoe. Understanding this internally tells us — the mistletoe now processed in such a way that it can really transfer this etheric substance wrested from the tree to the human being, which under certain circumstances is done by means of injections — this tells us: As an external substance, mistletoe takes over what is proliferating etheric substance in carcinoma, reinforced by the fact that it pushes back the physical substance, the effect of the astral body, and thereby causes the tumor of the carcinoma to crumble, to disintegrate. So when we introduce the mistletoe substance into the human organism, we are actually introducing the etheric substance of the tree into the human being, and the etheric substance of the tree, transferred to the human being via the mistletoe carrier, has a strengthening effect on the human astral body.

This is a path that can only be taken if we understand how the etheric body of the plant acts on the astral body of the human being, if we understand how the spiritual essence of the plant, which is extracted from the tree by the parasitic plant, acts on the astral body of the human being.

You see, what I said yesterday is also true in concrete terms: when we use healing substances, we should not only use what the chemist thinks about and talks about, but we should also use what is spiritual in these substances.

Now, I was able to show you that in Graves' disease, the astral body stiffens and the ego organization cannot control this astral body. The whole complex of symptoms presents itself as I described yesterday. What will be important? It will be important to strengthen the power of the ego organization. Here it is a matter of taking a look at something that plays a minor role in people's ordinary dealings with the outside world. People eat many things and have many things in their diet, but certain metals, for example, are not part of the diet. Copper or copper ore, for example, copper glance or cuprite, are not part of the diet.

It is precisely those substances that do not play a role in human beings' ordinary dealings with nature that have the greatest effect in their spiritual part on the more spiritual being of human beings. For example, we find that copper glance, copper, and sulfur have the strongest conceivable effect on the ego organization of human beings, really strengthening the ego organization.

If, in the case of Graves' disease, the person is given copper glance in the appropriate preparation, then the stiffening astral body described to you yesterday is countered by an ego organization that dominates this astral body, because copper glance comes to the aid of the ego organization with its inner power, and the necessary balance between the astral body and the ego organization is established.

I have chosen these examples first of all in order to show you inwardly how every product of nature that we have around us can be studied: How does it affect the physical body of the human being? How does it affect the etheric body of the human being? How does it affect the astral body, the ego organization?

I have shown you, using the example of mistletoe, Viscum, either Viscum pini or Viscum mali, how mistletoe affects the relationship between the etheric body and the astral body, which must be taken into account in particular in a therapeutic approach that leads to the fight against carcinoma.

I have shown you how copper gloss affects the ego organization. I have shown you what needs to be considered in Graves' disease, so that one can say: If one is able to look at the human being on the one hand, how the physical, etheric, astral bodies and the ego are interwoven and live together, how this becomes abnormal in a state of illness, and if one also sees through what is outside in nature, then one has, for example, the following view: The ego organization is too weak in Graves' disease. Outside, I have the copper sheen. This copper sheen, brought together with the ego organization, strengthens it considerably. You see, when you consider something like this, you gain a wonderful insight into the connection between human beings and nature. The big, wonderfully effective question is answered for us: Why do human beings absorb so many substances in their food? Why do others play such a minor role? In healthy people, the latter do not play a special role, but in sick people they begin to play a special role, because it is precisely those substances that are not contained in food that have a particularly strong effect on the spiritual part of the human being; it is the minerals, plants, and even animal products that do not act in food that have a special affinity with the ego, with the astral organization.

And so these things really involve looking into the deep secrets of nature. This looking into the deep secrets of nature, I would say into the mysteries of nature, actually leads to the possibility of directly connecting the view of the sick person with the view of the effective remedy. Just as I know that a magnet attracts iron, and if I have a magnet and bring iron filings close to it, the iron filings are attracted, when I recognize the effect of the magnet on the iron filings, I know what is happening. If I know in the same way how spiritual copper gloss is, on the other hand, what a person lacks when they have the symptoms of Graves' disease, then that is what it means to permeate medicine with spiritual insight.

Only when one enters into the whole connection between the four members of the human being will one find the way to discover these relationships, which I have now indicated, between non-human substances, natural substances, and the healthy and sick human being themselves. But first we must look at how these four members of the human being — the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the ego — behave very differently in the two alternating states in which human beings live in their earthly existence, in the two states of waking and sleeping. When awake, our physical organization is permeated by the etheric organization. Within this, the astral organization spreads out, filling both organizations internally, so to speak. And the whole thing is in turn permeated by the ego organization, so that if we want to imagine this schematically, we can say: We can imagine the waking human being in this diagram, with the physical and etheric organizations filling him, and also something protruding about him, the astral and ego organizations, which I indicate here with a different color. (A drawing is made.)

When we have the sleeping human being before us, we have the physical body and the etheric body lying in bed. The human being only develops mineral and plant activity in a non-plant organization, as the plant does. We have the physical body and the etheric body lying in bed. In contrast, we have the astral body and the ego organization outside the physical and etheric bodies. Schematically, I can draw this so that the astral body and the ego organization (red) now surround the etheric body and the physical body like a kind of cloud that loses itself in the indefinite, becoming larger and larger. But we cannot say that during the day, when we are awake, the astral body and the ego organization are active within us, and during sleep, conversely, the ego and the astral organization are not in the physical body and etheric body; that is not the case. We can only say: when we are awake, the ego organization and astral body work from within, dynamically leading the organs and the forces of the organs in all directions, everywhere. When we are asleep, they work from without. In a sense, just as the effects of the cosmos otherwise penetrate our senses and become the content of our consciousness as sensory perceptions and ideas, so when we are asleep we are enveloped by our astral body and our ego organization. They sink, apart from us, into the spirit of the cosmos and work through the eyes, through the ears, through everything that is peripheral to the human organization.

Note to previous sentence: Brane had suggested 'ascend' but the verb is senken 'to sink' or descend

We have thus characterized the difference between the waking state and the sleeping state by saying that our ego and our astral body work from within in all directions in the waking state. Our ego and our astral body work from the outside with the spiritual forces of the cosmos back on us in the sleeping state. We therefore have the opportunity to see that effects can take place on our etheric body and in our physical body through our spiritual organization, both from the outside and from the inside.

Now, when we understand this, we come to see how the spiritual essences of natural products are related to these processes, which constitute human beings as sleeping and waking. For example, it is peculiar that when we ingest a substance that is not part of the normal food system, namely lead, in any way, this lead always has the effect of first urging the human being to bring his astral body to the outside, just as happens in sleep. Lead actually has the effect of putting people into a state of sleep, pushing the astral body and the ego organization outward. Just imagine this vividly. People want to sleep when they consume lead. But in reality, they do not fall asleep. What happens is that the ego and the astral body are pushed out. But at the same time, lead prevents external influences from entering. Lead propels the astral body and the ego organization centrifugally outward, but it prevents the centripetal forces that act inwardly. The person falls half asleep, but cannot sleep completely because the effect of the outside world is hindered by the consumption of lead.

The result of this is that under normal circumstances, when a healthy person ingests lead, he does not fall asleep, but instead experience dizziness, fainting, and all the conditions that must occur with the weakening of the ego and the astral organization in the physical body and etheric body.

But let us assume that such an abnormality has occurred in the human organization that when the person is put to sleep or puts himself to sleep, the ego organization and the astral body become too strongly rooted in the outer world, that is, they absorb too much of the spirituality of the non-human cosmos, so that these effects become too strong, so that every time the person falls asleep, they receive too strong effects from outside, too strong non-material effects from outside, spiritual effects. Then they fall into sclerosis.

NOTE for last paragraph noted by Brane: We changed the translation of geistig to 'non-material' as Steiner emphasises this by appending the word spirituelle, which made the sentence confusing

This is the real cause of sclerosis: instead of organizing themselves internally, people receive too strong effects from outside, especially when they are asleep. Sometimes, as they grow older and these effects can occur, the human organism refuses to accept these excessive external influences through insomnia. But one cannot remain in a state of insomnia. The consequence of this is that when one grows old and still has to sleep, the astral body and the ego organization, which emerge from the physical body and the etheric body in old age, absorb too many external influences and have too strong a reaction on the organism. What do we find when we grow old and still have to sleep, and the astral body and the ego organization that emerge in old age absorb too many external influences and react too strongly on the organism? We find that when we now introduce lead into the human organism, dizziness and fainting do not occur, but only the sclerotic forces are held back under certain circumstances by preparing the lead into an appropriate remedy. The astral forces from outside and the ego forces from outside, the sclerotic forces, are prevented because the person then also goes through states in which they do not fall asleep, but in which only their astral body and ego organization are driven out by the lead, while the excessive forces from outside are prevented.

In this way, by understanding the relationship between the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the ego, one comes to understand thoroughly what the effect of lead can be based on, how the effect of lead can be a counteraction to the sclerotic effect.

This is precisely what it means to understand the human organization, to understand the spiritual foundations of the external world, thereby enabling us to bring the two into interaction and thus have a corresponding influence on health and illness.

Now, of course, it is a matter of being able to combine the various effects. I have explained to you that silicic acid is related to the sense organs, to the entire periphery of the human organism, and in turn to the ego organization. We have now also learned how lead has a certain relationship to the ego organization. By producing a remedy in the appropriate manner, which is prepared in the proper way from silicic acid and lead together, one may, under certain circumstances, strengthen the centrifugal force of lead or reduce the centripetal force of silicic acid, thus obtaining a remedy that actually has an inner vitality that one can see through and know how it works in the human organism.

This is the essence of the remedies that can be produced on the basis of such a spiritual foundation of medicine. They are produced with a complete understanding of what actually takes place inside and outside the human being; and they are produced in such a way that it is now important that the person who inaugurates them, who brings them into the world, understands the spiritual connections that are given to these remedies. It is therefore a matter of being able to produce, alongside remedies that focus solely on the chemical forces that are cited in our materialistic chemistry, remedies of which one can say: the spirituality of the world has been channeled into this remedy in this particular way.

This will be the essence of the remedies that will be produced when medicine is given this spiritual foundation. It will be known that what is important with these remedies is that they are not only prepared with what the chemist understands, but that they are also imbued with the spiritual forces of the world. It is the spirit itself, spirituality, that is directly applied in therapy. That is what is important with these things.

You see, one can go even further in this direction. By understanding the human organization in the way I described yesterday, one can arrive at a strictly precise understanding — I can only hint at this here — of how the physical and etheric bodies are what is given to the human being in the stream of heredity, that is, what is inherited from the father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, and so on, but how that which descends from the spiritual world, sinks into the human physical and etheric bodies, and again passes through the gate of death into the spiritual world, lies in the ego organization and the astral body. That which lives and breathes in the human being as the enduring, the enduring beyond the physical body, is his actual immortality.

But when we speak scientifically, we must not merely say immortal, but we must add the other to the immortal. Just as that which passes through the gate of death in the I and in the I-organization and in the astral body, entering the spiritual world, represents in this way the actual core of the human being, but dynamically intervenes in its physical and etheric organization, so this is also present before birth or conception. It comes from the spiritual world, constitutes, works, and builds with the physical and etheric bodies. We must also speak of the unborn.

In the study of nature, we have strayed so far from the truth in this area that, for certain religiously egoistic reasons, because human beings want to know what will happen to them after death, we speak of immortality, but because human beings are already here, they are not interested in what came before birth or conception. But if we want to speak scientifically, we must speak of unbornness as well as immortality, for it is unbornness and immortality together that make up eternity.

So we can say: that which is the eternal core of the human being, which submerges through conception, embryonic development, and birth into the physical and etheric body, which in turn leaves this physical and etheric organization at death, must, as it submerges into the physical and etheric organization, adapt itself to this physical and etheric body.

This is not always readily available in human development. There is definitely an inner struggle. When the child enters the world, the astral body and the ego come from the spiritual world, and the physical body and etheric body come from the inheritance of the ancestors. They must struggle to fit together. You can observe this process of struggling to fit together externally, in an external manifestation, by looking at the various types of childhood diseases.

The true light is only shed on childhood diseases when you look at them in such a way that the eternal core of the human being, the actual spiritual foundation, has to adapt to what is given through heredity. And in particular, when the etheric body has difficulty adapting to the astral body and the ego organization, to which it must adapt, but finds it difficult to do so, we see a disease arise that stems precisely from the fact that the etheric body asserts itself predominantly over the approaching ego and the approaching astral organization. And this predominant assertion of the etheric body, this resistance, so to speak, is expressed in rickets.

Now, by tracing the spiritual back to the physical, we can answer the question in a special way: How can I take away the counteracting power of this etheric body, which in a sense opposes the astral body? What takes away this power in the normal way when the human being gradually enters the physical world from the spiritual world during its embryonic period?

This leads us to study how the human being enters the physical world from the spiritual world during the embryonic period, and we find that there is a special relationship between the forces present in phosphorus or phosphorus compounds and those forces present in the uterus that oppose embryonic development. If these forces were not present in the uterus, every human being would simply develop rickets. The uterus is at the same time a constant remedy against rickets, as it contains forces that are of the same kind in the organism as the forces present in external nature in the mineral substance phosphorus or in phosphorus compounds.

Thus the mysteries are revealed, so that when a person who has become rachitic is given phosphorus treatment, the lack of phosphorus effect of the uterus is compensated for in the outside world after birth.

And so, if one sees through the inner spiritual nature of what happens in humans and in the interaction between humans and nature, one can actually paralyze disease processes that are present in the appropriate manner through their counteraction.

You see, this is the principle underlying the spiritual foundation of medicine that I spoke about yesterday, which is to be addressed for the first time in the book by Dr. Wegman and myself, and which does not seek to engage in amateurish criticism of scientific medicine, but only to add to what can be just as scientifically accurate, only penetrating into the spiritual world. wants to add to what is already there in proper scientific terms.

And one can say: it is precisely those who are quite familiar with the fundamentals of today's scientific medicine and who simply pursue these fundamentals of today's scientific medicine a little further who will come to seek the extension towards the spiritual side.

And in a certain sense, for those who seek the spiritual in human beings, illnesses, however undesirable, unpleasant, and unsympathetic they may be from the standpoint of life, are in fact infinitely illuminating for those who seek spiritual enlightenment about human beings. For illness reveals, in an abnormal way, through intensification or weakening, the effects of that which must constantly be at work in human beings in order for them to be spiritual beings at all.

Just think, if human beings did not have the effects of lead within them, without actually having lead in them, they would not be thinking beings. The thought process would continually prove dull due to a latent sclerotization. Knowing this, the process that occurs here, which I have described here, the lead process that counteracts sclerosis, has an illuminating effect on the way in which thinking in human beings comes about in the first place.

Psychology or soul science can learn an enormous amount from pathology and therapy.

But this opens up the prospect that, by combining a spiritual approach with medicine, our worldview can in turn be made somewhat more universal than it is today in its specialization.

I would like to add just a few words to what I have said, after this has been translated, at the end.

One can look back on the development of humanity, namely on the development of the spirit that has sustained human civilization and individual civilizations, and which has also produced what we call knowledge and science.

If we look back to very ancient times, times that can actually only be traced today with the insight of spiritual research, as I characterized it yesterday, we see — as I already indicated yesterday — we must look for places of learning that were not like our schools, but places of learning where human beings were first introduced to understanding nature and understanding human beings, after their souls had been prepared to look into the spiritual aspect of the external world. Those places of learning, which we have become accustomed to calling mysteries, were not one-sided schools, but were in fact what today appear separately in the world: they were religious places of worship, they were places where the arts were cultivated, and at the same time they were places where knowledge was cultivated in the most diverse areas of human life.

These ancient mysteries were organized in such a way that those who had to teach did not initially present what they had to communicate to people in abstract terms, but in images, images that in their inner configuration represented the real conditions, the real effects in the world. This enabled them to present these images in what we would today call a cult-like manner.

This then branched out in a certain direction, shaping these images in such a way that they carried beauty within themselves. The cult became artistic in certain directions.

And then, when what was not gained from arbitrary imagination, but from those images that were copied from the mysteries of the world itself, was represented in ideas, that was science at that time. The same thing represented in such a way that it evoked in its images the essence of human will as piety was religious cult. The same thing represented in such a way that it delighted and uplifted the human mind, touched it graciously, and drew it up sublimely to beauty, was art. And the place of art was directly united with the place of worship. The same thing represented in the form of ideas was knowledge, was science.

But this did not appeal one-sidedly to the human intellect, to sensory observation, to external sensory experimentation; it appealed to the whole human being, body, soul, and spirit. But it also penetrated to those depths in the essence of things where reality is revealed, on the one hand in such a way that it harmonizes divinely with piety, and on the other hand in such a way that it expresses itself in a true context of ideas. This way of pursuing the truth, beauty, and also the morality of human nature was called, and can still be called today, the path to the initiates, to the beginnings of things. For people were aware that they were living in the beginnings of things by conjuring them, these beginnings, into the cultic act, into the beautiful revelation, into the truly formed world of ideas. And such an approach to the things of the world was then called initiatory knowledge, the knowledge of the beginnings from which all things can be understood, all things can be dealt with through our will. Initiatory science, which penetrated the mysteries of the world, the beginnings, was what people were actually seeking.

There had to come a time in human development when this initiatory science receded, when human beings had to use their spiritual power to become more consciously aware of themselves. Human beings received the old initiatory science as if in a dream, as if instinctively. There was no question of human beings developing toward freedom. A development toward freedom has only come about because human beings have been driven away from the beginnings for a time, have lost sight of the initiatory view for a time, and have not gone to the beginnings, but to what are more the ends, the outer sensory revelation, and what can be explored at the ends through experimentation.

Today the time has come again when we must consciously seek initiation science after an immeasurably broad, I would say, science of ends, a science of surfaces, which can only have an external relationship to art and religion, we must once again seek the science of initiation with consciousness, with the consciousness we have acquired through exact science, with the consciousness that can be no less exact in this newer science of initiation than in exact science.

But then the bridge will be built again from what appears as a worldview, in order to bring the human soul together with its origin in the inner formation of ideas, to what consists in the practical handling of what is seen in the idea. In the ancient mysteries, therefore, what was in this way an initiatory view was united above all with what related to the healing of human beings, the art of healing. For that was also an art, the art of healing, which at the same time called upon human beings to see the healing process as a sacrificial process. It will in turn have to establish a closer connection with what appears in a more or less philosophical form as a worldview in order to satisfy the inner needs of the human soul. That is what, I would say, is sought in the anthroposophical movement in the recognition of what the times demand of us.

This anthroposophical movement, which has its center at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, does not want to bring anything arbitrary into the world, nor does it want to achieve anything unworldly, abstract, or nebulously mystical; it wants to intervene directly in all practical work, in all practical human activity. It wants to consciously strive for what was instinctively strived for in ancient, primitive times.

Even if this is only a beginning, the close connection between the Goetheanum, which strives for a worldview in the spiritual sense, and Dr. Wegman's clinic makes it possible to restore what was taken for granted in ancient times, when knowledge was mystery knowledge: to bring medicine into the closest possible connection with spiritual vision. And that is what the anthroposophical movement would like to fulfill in response to the demands of the times. We can therefore hope that this collaboration between worldview and clinical practice, this work toward initiation, will give rise to life and, in addition to an initiatory knowledge that meets modern requirements, also to an initiatory medicine, a medicine as an initiatory science. In these two hours, I have attempted to outline in a few strokes how this is being sought in the early stages.

I know how little can be done with such hints in a few strokes. I must therefore be all the more grateful that, thanks to the kindness of Mrs. and Dr. Larkins, I have been able to give these hints here before you. I therefore thank Mrs. and Dr. Larkins for their kind willingness to make this gathering possible. I thank you for your attention, which I appreciate, because what I have to say to you is not merely a theoretical aspiration, but something that, if one wants to advocate it in this day and age, one must truly hold dear with the innermost fibers of one's heart.