13. The Relationships Between Spiritual Science and Individual Academic Subjects III

Now, of course, there is no longer such skepticism about these things, but in practice it is basically still the case. And that is why it is so difficult for a real medical science to penetrate through all the possible amateurism and quackery that can flourish precisely because it is so difficult to raise awareness of what real science actually is in this field. But this is connected with our scientific view in general. It is connected with something that one believes – rightly, but in a one-sided way – to be a part of the great scientific insights of the 19th century, something that is called the doctrine of descent. In an extraordinarily astute way, in a way that has led individual researchers to the most scrupulous methods of observation, the developmental series of organisms from the imperfect to the more perfect has been sought and placed at the top of the human being, this whole human being as he stands before us today in his organization. To a certain extent, his organism in its entirety has been regarded as a transformation of the animal organism. This has only been possible because certain inner relationships of the human organism have been the subject of completely false concepts. Naturally, I can only hint at these things. They will arise out of a truly comparative genetic-morphological approach to embryology, out of a morphological consideration of the organs, out of a truly comparative genetic-morphological approach to embryology, out of the facts of embryology, in connection with the facts of life. Today, more or less everyone has the idea that, for example, we have something in the brain that can be seen as a complicated formation of what is present in the spinal cord as a nervous organism. In a sense, what is organized in the spinal cord is seen as the original, and what is present in the brain is seen as having emerged from this spinal cord in a complicated way. You cannot interpret the phenomena in this way. If you follow the facts of embryology in an unbiased way, you will get a completely different view. One will come to the view that what is present in the brain can be traced back to such a simpler organization as is present in the spinal cord, but that the spinal cord, as the further development of which the brain is to be regarded, must be thought of as lying more or less horizontally in the brain itself — if I may put it this way. In our present brain, what is spinal cord-like as a basis for our brain - going backwards from the forehead to the back of the head - is only ideally predisposed, so that one has to imagine the brain as a transformation of this formation, which today is only present in the brain in an idealized form, while what we have today in man as the spinal cord can be seen as emerging from the same formative laws as the human brain, but remaining at an earlier stage. So when we look at the spinal cord and the brain in context, we have to say that both are based on the same formative laws, but the brain has been brought to a further stage through this formation. It is only at a later point in phylogeny that the laws of formation intervene in the spinal cord, and it does not reach the same level as the brain. Therefore, the spinal cord is to be seen as the later formation, the initial stage of which lies in an earlier period in the genesis of humanity. The brain is to be placed at an even earlier stage, and it is to be seen as more advanced, so that one must say: the spinal cord is phylogenetically the later formation, which has only remained at an earlier stage, while the brain has been brought to a further stage by this formation.