{"corpus":"steiner","locus":"GA 346/1924-09-21/p024","lang":"en","edition":"English","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"text":"If you look at a human being on earth in his physical body, one cannot really think of this body's structure in terms of mere growth or in terms of the shooting and sprouting that goes on in it. You must add some degradative processes to the organism, that lead to excretions. They represent degradation and they show that the physical body is in a continual process of destruction which, however, is destined to absorb spiritual things, since it is degradation at the physical level; so that the spirit can then live in the physical, degradative processes. We know that spiritual things don't live in a human organism's anabolic processes. Spiritual things are suppressed and not promoted when man grows and when physical processes are becoming more active. Materialists are very silly when they say that man only has to purify the shooting and sprouting life in his brain, and that a continuation of biological processes becomes refined and transformed there—and that this amounts to thinking. If the brain would only be a continuation of digestive processes it would have dull, vegetative inner experiences. Spiritual things only enter the brain because it is continuously punctured by physical processes, as it were, so that it decomposes and falls apart. Spiritual things intervene in physical things in a creative way via degradation. The physical body absorbs degradative processes. We see that an inhibition and a holding back is built into the growth.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"title":"Lecture XVII","site_heading":"The Apocalypse as Initiation: Spiritual Hierarchies and Divine Love","site_heading_note":"A heading the site wrote for this unit from a summary of it; not in the edition, and not the words of Rudolf Steiner or of the translator. Cite the unit by its title and locus, never by this heading, and do not quote it.","date":"1924-09-21","location":null,"word_count":240,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/346/1924-09-21/p024","alignment_confidence":"low","alignment_reason":"count_diverges","two_voice_volume":false,"translation_credit":{"scope":"unit","status":"not_established","translator":null,"identified_edition":"UNK1995","book_title":"Lectures to Priests The Apocalypse","publisher":null,"publisher_inferred":false,"match_score":1.0,"source_url":"https://www.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA346/English/UNK1995/19240921v02.html","evidence":null,"reason":"no_translator_named","note":"Neither the lecture's own page nor rsarchive's lecture list names a translator for it. No translator is established for this lecture: nothing at the level of the lecture names one. Do not attribute this English to a translator, and do not borrow a credit from another lecture of the volume. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"edition_coverage":{"de":["original"],"en":["English"]},"available_versions":[{"lang":"en","edition":"English","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/346/1924-09-21/p024"}],"record":{"record_type":"unknown","scope":"volume","note":"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.","evidence":null,"evidence_translation":null,"evidence_source":null},"witness_completeness":{"ratio":0.97,"band":"comparable","note":null,"word_count":4260,"original_word_count":4373,"may_be_abridged":false},"witness_quality":{"translator":{"scope":"unit","status":"not_established","translator":null,"identified_edition":"UNK1995","book_title":"Lectures to Priests The Apocalypse","publisher":null,"publisher_inferred":false,"match_score":1.0,"source_url":"https://www.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA346/English/UNK1995/19240921v02.html","evidence":null,"reason":"no_translator_named","note":"Neither the lecture's own page nor rsarchive's lecture list names a translator for it. No translator is established for this lecture: nothing at the level of the lecture names one. Do not attribute this English to a translator, and do not borrow a credit from another lecture of the volume. Cite the German for anything load-bearing.","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"not_checkable","note":"No verified paragraph alignment covers this passage, so its names cannot be compared with the German."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}}