Atmospheric Composition, Organ Systems, and Healing Substances

But it is otherwise with vegetable albumen. Vegetable albumen is, so it seems, not controlled by any analogous group of organs, but it is under another influence; namely, of the four elements, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon, and also under that of the meteorologically omnipresent mediator between these four main elements, namely sulphur. In vegetable albumen, these four elements dispersing themselves throughout the atmosphere, perform the same office as the lungs, heart, liver and so forth, within man. External nature contains in these four substances the same formative forces as are individualised in the human organism through the four main groups. It is important to remember that in speaking of oxygen, hydrogen and so forth, we should not limit their meaning to the inherent forces and attributes recognised by modern chemistry, but that we should conceive these elements as possessing formative forces, with activities which affect one another mutually, and by which they contribute to the furnishing of the earth sphere. If we consider them separately and in detail, we must identify the external operation of oxygen with the internal operation of the kidney and urinary system. What is done in the outer world, by the formative forces of carbon, we must identify internally with the pulmonary system: not regarding the lungs however as organs of respiration, but as possessing particular formative forces. We must identify nitrogen with the liver system, hydrogen with the cardiac system (see Diagram 22). Hydrogen is indeed the heart of the outer world; and nitrogen the liver of the external world, etc.