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

But what do we actually have here? You see, we have something here that, if expressed today, seems almost fantastical, because one has to resort to concepts that today's science does not want to accept at all, because, although they are fully rooted in reality, they are quite remote. But we shall never be able to penetrate what we observe in the world if we do not take metamorphosis seriously in this way, even where what has been metamorphosed is no longer at all similar to the original, if we do not regard even there, so to speak, a developed Goetheanism as an ideal for genuine scientific work. It must be said that in a certain area of the human organism, where normally only the tendency to form glands should be present, the tendency to form a sensory organ can be deposited, which then undergoes a sensory organ formation process. And here we have looked at the disease process that can be observed in carcinogenesis, in carcinoma. I will give a concrete example, I will not be embarrassed to cite something that is still laughed at today.