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

And so we may trace the whole human organism back to a scheme or plan where everything in the separate organs is prepared in the germ. And, in fact, we do see in the human germ which comes into existence through the process of impregnation that in the four superimposed germ-layers (the outer germ-layer or exoderm, the inner germ-layer or entoderm, and the outer and inner middle layers or mesoderma) the four principal systems of the human organism are actually already present, pre-modelled in this germinal plan. Furthermore, in accordance with our evolution we shall have to consider the outer germ-layer, which, in contemporary anatomy or physiology is called the skin-sense layer, as the product of a metamorphosis which reveals to us its original plan in the outer middle layer. In the outer mesoderm, that is, we have as an embryonic plan in a descending evolution, what appears at a higher stage in the skin-sense-layer; and in the inner middle layer we have in a younger formation and in a downward evolution, what appears in the inner layer or entoderm as the intestinal glandular-layer. When we observe the human germ in its evolution we have in the two middle germ-layers, in what external physiology calls the mesoderma, the original plan of the human being still recognisable; whereas the two external germ-layers, exoderm and entoderm, are layers which have undergone a metamorphosis. The two middle layers reveal to us the original state, whereas the two others reveal higher evolutionary stages of this state. And it is only an illusion when external microscopic research does not accurately state the facts of the case.