XXVI. Memory and Conscience

Between the two lies the rhythmic organism. Conscience is formed—though as a process purely of the soul and spirit—within the metabolic and limb organism. This is developed in two directions, so that each side is polar in relation to the other. As Breathing rhythm, it is intimately associated with Sense-Perception and with Thinking. In lung-breathing, the process is at its coarsest. It becomes more delicate, and as refined and sublimated breathing becomes sense-perceiving and thinking. Still quite close to Breathing—only a breathing through the sense-organs, not through the lungs—is Sense-Perception. Beginning then to be more remote from lung-breathing and having for its support the Thinking organism, is the forming of mental conceptions, Thinking as such. And already bordering on the other side upon the rhythm of the blood-circulation—beginning to be an inward breathing that combines with the metabolic and limb organism—is the function which manifests itself in the play of Fancy. This extends then, as a soul-function, down into the sphere of the Will, even as the circulatory rhythm extends into the metabolic and limb organism.