The Human Being as Body, Soul and Spirit

GA 347 — 9 September 1922, Dornach

IV. Knowledge of the Human Being According to Body, Soul or Spirit, Brain and Thinking — The Liver as a Sensory Organ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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