7. The Conscious Life of Man

Thus we may to a certain extent characterise in this way the physical correlatives which accompany the inner soul-processes. What I have just been characterising is obviously not something of a crude physical nature, but rather extraordinarily fine and minute processes, fine to such a degree, indeed, as cannot usually be imagined. With the exception, perhaps, of the processes of warmth, they are of such a nature that, in comparison with all that we know of similar processes in the outside physical world, they manifest an extreme delicacy. They are processes which the organism carries out by means of all its forces, when the ego is active, with the help of the instrument of the blood: from the process of salt-depositing to the coagulation of fluid and the producing of warmth. They are in part of such a nature that we might say the entire organism is affected by them; or, in the case of the thinking process for example that one part of our organisation, the brain or the spinal cord, is chiefly affected by them. Moreover these processes, which are the results of the influence of soul- processes, are distributed in the most varied way possible in the human organism. When we gradually learn to know that these are facts we come to the point where we are compelled to admit that what we call thoughts or feelings are actual forces, which have a real influence within the physical organisation and which express themselves in real effects; so that, as a result of purely occult observation, we are obliged to speak of a real action of the soul upon the human organism. These real effects in the finer processes will, during the next few decades, reveal themselves gradually and ultimately become entirely accessible to the more refined methods of science, even to external investigation. There will then be an end to that opposition which, arising not out of the facts of science but obviously out of certain preconceived theories with reference to these facts, combats such affirmations as may be based upon occult knowledge.