II. Three Aspects of the Human Being

GA 301/1920-04-21/p014 ·1920-04-21 · English MediumMedium alignmentSome paragraph re-numbering between this translation and the German original — the locus may slip by a paragraph or two.
Record: unknown. How this text was taken down (shorthand transcript, listeners' notes or manuscript) is not on record here. Unknown is not an assurance of a stenogram: check the edition's own notes before resting an argument on one word.

Modern science speaks of sense nerves, which it presumes exist in order to provide impressions of the external world from the periphery of the body to the central organ. We also hear that motor nerves exist to carry will impulses from the central system to the periphery of the body. I will speak more of this later. People have created very clever theories to prove that this difference between the sense and motor nerves exists. But this difference does not exist. More important than these clever theories is the fact that you can cut a motor nerve and then connect one end to the end of a sense nerve that you have also cut. This then becomes a nerve of one kind. It shows that we can find no real differences in function between the motor and sense nerves, even in an anatomical or physiological sense. The so-called motor nerves do not carry will impulses from the central organ to the human periphery.

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Cite: GA 301/1920-04-21/p014 · edition English