Lecture XIII

Certain not precisely old but somewhat medieval technical terms are misleading and unhelpful in this respect—and when I use the phrase medieval, I refer not to the Middle Ages but to those times which we have only just passed through. It is not quite correct to refer to tumours as neoplasms. They are “new” only in the trivial sense of not having been there before, but they are not “neoplasms” in the sense of sprouting on the actual soil of the organism, i.e., on its boundary, the skin. But owing to the vehement opposition developing in some special process of the physical body, as against the etheric, the body of man becomes subjected to the outer nature inimical to man; the formation of a tumour provides an easy passage for all manner of external influences; and thus we should not neglect the study of the complementary opposite of this whole phenomenon. For this I refer you to the study of the extra-human world, let us say, to the formation of the mistletoe to begin with.