VI. The Present State of Philosophy and Science

In the sense of what I myself must regard as a spiritual scientific movement, it is my most urgent wish that those who have a background in physiology and medicine should familiarize themselves with the facts of spiritual science to such an extent that they can work through the results of physiology in terms of their factual character. Next spring, I myself will only be able to draw the basic lines of this spiritual scientific physiology at most. A great deal of work needs to be done. Our physiological literature contains the most wonderful material, one has only to know it. But one must also know the borderlands, and one must know how physiology is influenced by a true psychology, which today is very much buried in the rubble. It would be a longing of spiritual research that those of us who are trained in physiology should take a strictly exact look at certain physiological-anatomical results of recent times. Indeed, anyone familiar with the factual material knows that in certain areas that are needed at the moment, nothing has been done. But anyone who appropriates what has already been achieved in this field can easily do so; by appropriating it, they adopt it productively. Then, if he is imbued with spiritual knowledge at the same time, he will not be in a position to create such a basis of physiology where, in the dissection of the organism, each organ is regarded as having the same value. What is the essential thing that prevents today's physiology from coming to the fore? It is that the organism is dissected. We have heart, lungs, liver and so on; we study them all as if they were organic members with equal rights. But that is not the case. All these individual members have different antecedents of their values. And in a piece of liver, you do not have the same matter in your hand as you do in a piece of heart muscle and the like. The point is that, in addition to what is provided by purely external sensory perception, a certain factor is added, which I cannot describe other than as a certain objective value of the organ in question. This will become clear to the physiologist once he undertakes the work of comparing an organ in the fully developed human organism with actual embryology. He will then realize that embryology today works so one-sidedly because it only follows an ascending process and not a parallel descending one. One only proceeds in the right way when one brings out in each stage of embryological development, as in a mathematical function, a factor of decadence and another of productivity. And when we are able to apply what we have learned about valence to the organ in its full form in the organism, when we do not simply juxtapose the heart and liver as equivalent organs – they are of a different qualitative valence – then we will stand before the moment when the great results of our world of physiological facts will receive the greatest light.