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

I will show you this by means of a specific example of how these things, which I have now presented to you more in the abstract, assert themselves in the concrete grasp of the human organization. You can study how, for example, the epidermal cells of the human being are transformed epithelial cells into sensory cells, just as the glandular cells are also transformed epithelial cells. In this process, which indirectly reveals the connection between the sensory cells and the glandular cells, you will be able to see how what I mentioned yesterday, with regard to the sensory perception of the outside world and the sensory perception of the human interior, can be followed anatomically and physiologically in this metamorphosis of the cells themselves. And then, if you pursue this further by studying the facts that are already available today in an entirely empirical way, you will find that there is a certain process that leads from epithelial cells to sensory cells; that is one current in the organization. We can also follow this current in the opposite direction: epithelial cells – glandular cells. This enables us to gradually ascend in our consideration of the human organization to the way in which the senses are formed from the main organization and from the related organization through a certain development of forces, as if from the inside out. We have localized what can be seen in this process. But since things are not schematically localized in the human being, we have to say that they are mainly localized in the head; but they are also present in the rest of the organism, just as certain senses are spread over the whole organism, while the head preferably contains the senses. Thus we can see how human nature pushes us to develop the sense organs out of itself; other areas are more organized in the direction of developing the epithelium into a glandular state. When we see these polar opposites, we will say: when looked at inwardly – and one must look at human nature inwardly, otherwise one cannot see through it – it all rests on the fact that the current in the organization runs from the inside out one time, the other time, so to speak, in the opposite direction, from the outside in. Here we have something again that develops in the human organism in one direction or the other. And now, my dear audience, it can happen that, due to very specific conditions in areas of the human organism that are otherwise predisposed to processes that run from the outside in, these areas are crossed in an incorrect way by processes that run from the inside out. However paradoxical it may sound, it must be said that in an area of the human organism that in its normal organization is only predisposed to develop glandular tissue, the tendency can arise to lead to a predisposition for a sensory organ formation process. In a certain way, the tendency is incorporated into the epithelial formation, which is otherwise only justified in the human organism where the senses develop. Of course this can occur because, to a lesser extent, everything in the human organism is embedded in everything else; one only has to distinguish it; it can also express itself in the head, which is a counter-process to the sense-forming process. One need only bear in mind that secretory organs are asserting themselves everywhere alongside the sense organs.