Lecture VI

I will ask you to dwell for a little on this thought. Try to imagine that the spinal cord is nothing else than a strange and peculiar brain. It is quite possible to feel it as a brain that has been elongated and has become like a slender staff,—just as we can also see the brain as an inflated spinal cord. It will help us here if we picture man assuming for the moment the same posture in the world as the animals still have today,—that is to say, with his spine not vertically upright but parallel with the surface of the earth. Then you would have a brain that has simply been pulled out into the form of a staff. And now observe the human being as you would then have him before you, parallel with the surface of the earth, his back lying horizontal in space. In this position the spinal cord can very well pass for a kind of brain. And now we note something very strange and remarkable,—namely, that we have again appendages right and left, though of course exceedingly different from the arm appendages we had before. But imagine a condition where man had not developed symmetry as far as he has today (when the two arms are very nearly alike) but here one arm had experienced a peculiar development of its own which distinguished it very clearly from the other. In the present day there is even a tendency—and it is a foolish one!—to discard righthandedness and cultivate an equal left and righthandedness. But imagine now that the left arm were on the contrary to grow into a completely different organ; then it will not seem to you impossible or absurd to refer in the way we shall now do to two other appendages.