Lecture III

Within everything connected with the head system or nerve-sense system, we have breakdown processes, so that while our conceptual activity takes place in the waking state, when we perceive and form mental images, this activity is not bound up with growth and upbuilding processes but with breakdown processes, processes of elimination. This can be grasped if one looks in a sound way at what empirical-physiological science has already presented concerning this. There is already empirical evidence or to express it better, empirical corroboration—for what spiritual science provides through its perception. You need only pursue what certain inspired physiologists are able to present about the physical processes in the nervous system, which unfold as parallel phenomena to perceiving and forming mental images. You will see then that this assertion is certainly well supported, the assertion that when we think, when we think and perceive wakefully, we have to do with processes of elimination and breakdown, not with upbuilding processes. By contrast, where the will processes are mediated for the human being in the metabolic-limb system we are concerned with upbuilding processes.