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

When one has a clear understanding of human morphology, the first thing one does is to place it in the right relationship to the animal world. Then one says to oneself: if one goes back in the series of time, one sees that what has become of the human head is the most important transformation of its earlier organization. This can be traced back to earlier animal forms – I cannot go into the details now, so the whole thing will seem paradoxical – whereas the human form as a whole must be seen in such a way that the rest of the formation, which is attached to the head, has arisen under conditions that affect the overall form of man quite differently than the modern environment affects the overall form of the animal. Once we understand these relationships, we will relate the human form to the animal world in a completely different way than is the case today. Then, something else comes into play: when one looks at the human head and sees the particular relationships between the soft and bony parts, and compares this, especially in their position, with the relationships between the soft and bony parts in the attached limbs, then one comes to form ideas about the inner workings of the laws of formation in the human organism. And one comes to realize that the human head is not only in a continuous development, but that it carries something in itself, which one initially has to see not as an evolution, but as a devolution, as a retrogressive development, which is only maintained by the fact that this head organism is connected to the rest of the human organism and is maintained by it.