12. The Relationships Between Spiritual Science and Individual Academic Subjects II

If one actually pursues what can be observed impartially as sensory and motor processes, one will in fact find no basis for making such a distinction of nerves. But if one starts not from one-sided but from total presuppositions, one will be compelled to assume inward mediation of sensation just as much as one recognizes outward mediation of sensation. Just as one recognizes the transmission of sensation through the nerve from the outside, whereby one becomes inwardly aware of some entity of the external world, so it is necessary that a consciousness be transmitted from what is inwardly located in the human organism; it is necessary that a real sensation occur of that which is inwardly located in the human organism. And if we continue the investigation in this way, we will find in the so-called motor nerves nothing other than those nerves that convey perceptions of the inside of the body in the same way that the so-called sensitive nerves convey perceptions of external entities. On the one hand, we have nerves that connect us to the outside world; on the other hand, we have nerves that connect us to our own inner world. It is quite natural that if our optic nerves are not working and we are blind, we cannot reach for an object; and if the motor - but in truth the sensitive - nerve that is supposed to convey that a limb is to perform a movement is not in us, we simply do not perceive the relevant limb, the relevant processes in the limb, and we cannot perform the movements. A truly consistent train of thought shows us that what are called motor nerves are to be imagined as sensory nerves - only as those that convey inner sensations, the sensations of one's own body, the processes within one's own body. You will see that if you really apply the idea that I have just presented to what are now quite empirically established facts, you will be able to see through everything that these empirical facts represent, without contradiction, and that anyone who really thinks consistently cannot really do anything with the theories, such as those that exist about the difference between the sensitive and motor nerves, because in reality they continually lead to contradictions.