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

One then comes to examine, for example, how some process, say the movement of juices in the animal organism, is related to the movement of juices in the human organism. One comes to ascend from the plant to the animal organism and to see in what one encounters in the animal organization the corresponding processes in human nature. And then we also come to consider something like the contrast that exists in the process of plant formation outside of the human being and in the process in the human being. The plant builds its body on the basis of carbon. It deposits carbon in itself and separates oxygen. Man undergoes a similar process in his breathing in connection with the circulation of the blood, in the whole task of the blood circulation – but what happens there? There the carbon is bound to the oxygen, thus producing carbonic acid. We have here what is consolidated in the plant formation process, what is in a certain way external, present in the beginning in man, but which he then expels. We get a certain relationship between the plant formation process outside and that which underlies breathing in humans, which dilutes and breaks the process. And in turn, what is otherwise in the human organism is linked to breathing, and one can then compare that which is linked to the breakdown of these processes in the human organization and that which is linked to the build-up in the human organization. Let us assume that we find something in the human organism that represents a disease process in such a way as the beginning, the malformed beginning of a sense-formation process in cancer. Then, looking for what is in external nature, we can seek the opposite process. It will be possible to introduce it into the human organism by means of a remedy, and thereby have the same healing effect as the carbon has in the human organism, if I may put it this way, by supplying oxygen. It is identical. In this way one gains an inner insight into the connection between what is organized in man and external nature. One gains such insight that in what arises in external nature, one can rationally find the remedy that can serve for any corresponding process in the human organism.