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

One thing, however, you will have perceived: that this human organism is a complicated system of individual organs and instruments which stand at various stages of evolution, these stages differing very greatly among themselves, and which are connected in the greatest possible variety of ways with the organism as a whole. What it is that works into this physical organisation of man, which we see with our eyes and grasp with our hands, in order that the nutritive substances may organise themselves suitably, may be ordered according to the various organs, this cannot be seen with the external eye but it is disclosed to the spiritual eye of the seer. Everything that has displayed itself before us in the human organism we must look upon as one single system, wherein appears both what is young and what is old. We have brought out this fact in individual examples, for instance, in the fact that the brain shows itself as an older organ and the spinal cord as a younger one; and in the fact that the brain was once a spinal cord and has transformed itself out of that. Then, too, we have seen that our complicated digestive system forms, together with the blood-system, one single system which is old and has been metamorphosed; whereas in the lymph-system which cannot take up substances from without but can as yet open only inwards to the material supplied by the inner tissue, we have a younger system in comparison with the combined digestive and blood-system, just as we have in the spinal cord an organ that is younger than the brain. And this, again, is a very important viewpoint. When we look at our lymph-system and all that goes with it we have before us something which, if it were not embedded there as a lymph-system, and did not remain shut off but opened itself to the more advanced stage of its evolutionary process, would progress to a digestive system and blood-system as the spinal cord evolved to the brain. Thus the digestive-blood-system presents to us a lymph-system that has been metamorphosed out of the substances and tissues of the body, substances and tissues which, as we know, have to be changed in the body before they can take on the form which they have inside the man; whereas the lymph-system, as we have it, is employed to take up the substances that are produced inside. In the lymph-system and what pertains to it, we have a simpler digestive system and a simpler system for mediating consciousness. On the other hand, a system more complicated than the lymph-system, opening not only to the inner but also to the outer world, is what we have in the metamorphosed lymph-system, the digestive and glandular systems.