Atmospheric Composition, Organ Systems, and Healing Substances

This will also naturally make us attentive as to how we have to act in regard to the composition of the air, how we must notice whether we are in a position to give men air or whether to deprive them of it. Now you are able to take a more physiological approach, and to note the working of this correspondence. Pass in review all the substances at present known to us, and active in the human organism; and you will find that (with two exceptions) all these are found in combination with other substances within the human organism: as a rule we find compounds and solutions. Two only appear in their pure state within us; these are oxygen and nitrogen. So these main components of the atmosphere play also particular parts within our human bodies. Their interactions form as it were the very core of the substances in us. Oxygen and nitrogen are linked with the functions of the human organism; and they act as the only elements operating in their pure state, and not modified or deflected by other substances combined with them in the human organic sphere. So there is not only great significance in the actual presence of external substances, traceable within the human organism; we must also follow up the manner of their occurrence, and consider whether their operation remains free, or is bound up with something else. For the peculiar thing is that within the human organism, matter acquires special affinities to other forms of matter, and specific kinship. So if we introduce a substance into the organism which already contains a certain other substance, these affinities can become apparent. Follow this up, and you will come to a quite definite revelation, which spiritual science must point out. You are aware that vegetable, animal and human organisms are alike based on proteins, on albuminous substances. You know that, in the terms of contemporary chemistry, the main ingredients of albumen are the four main natural substances, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and, in addition, sulphur, as, so to speak, a homeopathic agent in the operations of the other four.