8. The Human Form and Its Co-ordination of Forces

We thus have a wonderful union of the two extremes of the human organisation. The nutritional stream, on the one hand, is taken into the digestive tract and this represents the external matter which enters our physical organisation. The ego, on the other hand, together with its instrument the blood, constitutes the noblest endowment which man possesses in the terrestrial world. It establishes a direct connection with the nutritional stream in that it comes to the very end of the blood-process, and there, at the end of the blood-process, in turn brings about the preparation of something which, we may say, directly confronts the nutritional stream. In other words, the gall is prepared by the instrument of the ego, the blood, through the roundabout way of the liver; and in the gall the ego opposes the nutritional stream. For at this point the activity of the blood has come to an end and, before acting upon the nutritional stream, it is able to prepare the gall.