3. Karma in Relation to Disease and Health

Now if one of the limbs of a crab is severed, the animal cannot at once renew it. But when it casts its shell the next time and arrives at the next transition stage of its life, a stump appears; the second time the stump grows larger, and if the animal were to cast its shell often enough, the limb would be replaced by a new one. These facts show us that the etheric body must make greater efforts to call forth the inner forces of healing; and in the higher animals the healing power is still less. If you mutilate a higher animal it can do nothing towards replacing the limb. Here we must allude to a fact which at the present time is the subject of an important dispute in the field of Natural Science: If you mutilate an animal, and the animal has progeny, the deformities are not transmitted to the offspring; the next generation has again the complete parts. When the etheric body carries its qualities over to the offspring it is again stimulated to form a complete organism. The etheric body of a triton still acts in the same animal; in a crab it acts only when it casts its shell; in the higher animals the same phenomenon appears only in the offspring, and there the etheric body replaces what had been mutilated in the previous generation. If we observe these phenomena rightly we shall clearly perceive that we must still speak of the healing forces in the etheric body even if these forces are manifested only in the succeeding generation when the offspring is born without the mutilation which the parent suffered. Here we have, as it were, a research into the why and wherefore of the healing powers of the etheric body.