Spiritual Science and Medicine
Lecture III

In this work, I first of all tried (and many empirical data confirm this truth, as we shall see) to prove, that only the processes proper to the formation of images are connected with the nervous system, whilst all the processes of feeling are linked — not indirectly but directly — with the rhythmic processes of the organism. The Natural Scientist of today assumes — as a rule — that the feeling processes are not directly connected with the rhythmic system, but that these bodily rhythms are transmitted to the nervous system, and thus indirectly, the feeling life is expressed through the nerve system.

Further I have tried to show that the whole life of our will depends directly on the metabolic system and not through the intermediary of the nerves. Thus the nervous system does nothing more than perceive will processes. The nervous system does not put into action the “will” but that which takes place through will within us, is perceived.

All the views maintained in that book can be thoroughly corroborated by biological facts, whereas the contrary assumption of the exclusive relation of the nerve system to the soul, cannot be proved at all. I should like to put this question to healthy unbiased reason: how can the fact that a so-called motor nerve and a sensory nerve can be cut, and subsequently grown together, so that they form one nerve, be harmonised with the assumption that there are two kinds of nerves: motor and sensory? There are not two kinds of nerves. What are termed “motor” nerves are those sensory nerves that perceive the movements of our limbs, that is, the process of metabolism in our limbs when we will. Thus in the motor nerves we have sensory nerves that merely perceive processes in ourselves, while the sensory nerves proper perceive the external world.

There is much here of enormous significance to medicine, but it can only be appreciated if the true facts are faced. For it is particularly difficult to preserve the distinction between motor and sensory nerves, in respect of the symptoms enumerated yesterday, as appertaining to tuberculosis. Therefore reasonable scientists have for some time assumed that every nerve has in itself a double conduction, one from the centre to the periphery, and also one from the periphery to the centre. Thus each motor nerve would have a complete double “circuit,” and if the explanation of any condition — such as hysteria — is to be based on the nervous system, one has to assume the existence of two nerve currents running in opposite directions. You see: as soon as one gets down to the facts, one must postulate qualities of the nervous system directly contrary to the accepted theories. Inasmuch as these conceptions about the nervous system have arisen, access has actually been barred to all knowledge of what goes on in the organism below the nervous system as in hysteria for example. In the preceding lecture, we defined this as caused by metabolic changes; and these are only perceived and registered by the nerves. All this should have received attention. But instead of such attentive study, there has been a wholesale attribution of symptoms and conditions to “nerves” alone, and hysteria was diagnosed as a kind of vulnerability and disequilibrium of the nervous system. This has led further. It is undeniable that among the more remote causes of hysteria are some that originate in the soul: grief, disappointment, disillusion, or deep-seated desires which cannot be fulfilled and may lead to hysterical manifestations. But those who have, so to speak, detached all the rest of the human organism from the life of the soul, and only admit a genuine direct connection between that life and the nervous system, have been compelled to attribute everything to “nerves.” Thus there has arisen a view which does not correspond in the least with the facts, and furthermore offers no available link between the soul and the human organism. The soul-forces are only admitted to contact with the nervous system, and are excluded from the human organism as a whole. Or, alternatively, motor nerves are invented, and expected to exercise an influence on the circulation, etc., an influence which is entirely hypothetical.

These errors helped to mislead the best brains, when hypnotism and “suggestion” came into the field of scientific discussion. Extraordinary cases have been experienced and recorded, though certainly some time ago. Thus, ladies afflicted with hysteria completely mystified and misled the most capable physicians, who swallowed wholesale all that these patients told them, instead of inquiring into the causes within the organism. In this connection, it is perhaps of interest to remind you of the mistake made by Schleich, in the case of a male hysteric. Schleich was fated to fall into this error, although he was quite well accustomed to think over matters thoroughly. A man who had pricked his finger with an inky pen, came to him and said that the accident would certainly prove fatal that same night, for blood poisoning would develop, unless the arm was amputated. Schleich, not being a surgeon, could not amputate. He could only seek to calm the man's fears, and carry out the customary precautions, suction of the wound, etc., but not remove an arm on the mere assertion of the patient himself. The patient then went to a specialist, who also declined to amputate. But Schleich felt uncomfortable about the case, and inquired early the next morning, and found that the patient had died in the night. And Schleich's verdict was: Death through Suggestion. And that is an obvious — terribly obvious explanation. But an insight into the nature of man forbids us to suppose that this death was due to suggestion in the manner assumed. If death through suggestion is the diagnosis, there had been a thorough confusion of cause and effect. For there was no blood poisoning — the autopsy proved this; but the man died, to all appearance, from a cause which was not understood by the physicians, but which must obviously have been deep-seated and organic. And this deep-seated organic cause had already — on the previous day — made the man somewhat awkward and clumsy, so that he stuck an inky pen into his finger, which is an action most people avoid. This was a result of his awkwardness. But this external and physical clumsiness was concurrent with an increased inner power of vision, and under the influence of disease, he foresaw that his death would occur that night. His death had not the least connection with the fact that he hurt his finger with an ink-stained pen, although this was the cause of his sensations, owing to the cause of death which he carried within him. Thus the whole course of events is merely externally linked with the internal processes which caused the death. There is no question of “death through suggestion” here. He foresaw his own death, however, and interpreted everything that happened, so as to fit into this sentiment This one example will show you how extremely cautious we must be, if we are to reach an objective judgment of the complicated processes of nature. In these matters one cannot take the simplest facts as a starting point.

Now we must pose this question: Does sensory perception, and all that resembles such perception, offer us any basis on which to estimate the somewhat dissimilar influences which are expected to affect the human constitution, through materia medica?

We have three kinds of influence upon the human organism in its normal state: the influences through sense perception, which then extend to the nervous system; the influences working through the rhythmic system, breathing and blood circulation; and those working through metabolism. These three normal relationships must have some sort of analogies in the abnormal relationships which we establish between the curative media — which we must after all take in some way from the external world of nature — and the human organism. Undoubtedly the most evident and definite results of this interaction between the external world and the human organism, are those affecting the nervous system. So we must ask ourselves this question: How can we rationally conceive a connection between man himself and that which is external nature; a connection of which we wish to avail ourselves, whether through processes, or substances with medicinal properties for human healing? We must form a view of the exact nature of this interaction between man and the external world, from which we take our means of healing. For even if we apply cold water treatment, we apply something external. All that we apply is applied from outside to the processes peculiar to man, and we must therefore form a rational concept of the nature of this connection between man and the external process.

Here we come to a chapter where again there is in the orthodox study of medicine a sheer aggregate instead of an organic connection. Granted that the medical student hears preliminary lectures on natural science; and that on this preparatory natural science, general and special pathology, general therapeutics and so forth, are then built up, but once lectures on medicine proper have begun, not much more is heard of the relationship between the processes discussed in these lectures, and the activities of external nature, especially in connection with healing methods. I believe that medical men who have passed through the professional curriculum of today, will not only find this a defect on the theoretical and intellectual side, but will even have a strong feeling of uncertainty when they come to the practical aspect, as to whether this or that remedy should be applied to influence the diseased process. A real knowledge of the relationship between the remedy indicated and what happens in the human body is actually extremely rare. So the very nature of the subject makes a major reform of the medical curriculum imperative.

I shall now try to illustrate the extent of the difference between certain external processes and human processes, by means of examples drawn from the former category. I propose to begin with what we can observe in plants and lower forms of animals, passing on from these to processes that can be activated through agencies derived from the vegetable, animal and especially the mineral kingdoms.

But we can only approach a characterisation of pure mineral substances, if we start from the most elementary conceptions of natural science, and then go on to the results, let us say, of the introduction of arsenic or tin into the human organism. But, first and foremost, we must emphasise the complete difference between the metamorphoses of growth in the human organism, and in external objects.

We shall not be able to escape forming some notion of the actual principle of growth, of the vital growth of and in mankind, and conceiving the same principle in external entities as well. But the difference is of fundamental significance. For instance, I would ask you to observe a very common natural object: the so-called locust tree, Robina pseudacacia. If the leaves of this plant are cut off where they join the petioles, there occurs an interesting metamorphosis; the truncated leaf stalk becomes blunt and knobby, and takes over the functions of the leaves. Here we find a high degree of activity on the part of something inherent in the whole plant; something that we will provisionally and by hypothesis term a “force,” which manifests itself if we prevent the plant from using its normally developed organ.

Now, observe, further, there is still a trace in mankind of what is so conspicuously present in the simple growing plant. For instance, if a man is prevented for one reason or another, from using one of his arms or hands for any purpose, the other arm or hand grows more powerful, stronger, and also physically larger. We must bring together facts like these. This is the path that leads to the cognition of remedial possibilities. In external nature these trends develop to extremes. For instance, this has been observed: A plant has grown on the slope of a mountain; certain of its stems develop in such a way that the leaves remain undeveloped; on the other hand the stem curves round and becomes an organ of support. The leaves are dwarfed; the stem twists round, becomes a supporting organ, and finds its base. These are plants with transformed stems, whose leaves have atrophied. (See Diagram 6).

Such facts point to inherent formative forces in the plant itself enabling it to adapt itself, within wide limits, to its environment. The same forces, active and constructive from within, are also revealed among lower organisms in an interesting way.

Take, for example, any embryo which has reached the gastrula stage of development. You can cut up this gastrula, dividing it through the middle, and each half rounds out and evolves the potentiality within itself of growing its own three portions of the intestine — the fore, middle and hind portion, independently. This means that if the gastrula is cut in two, we find that each half behaves just as the whole gastrula would have behaved. You know that this experiment can even be applied to forms of animal life as high in the scale as earthworms; that when portions are removed from these creatures, they are restored, the animal drawing on its internal formative forces to rebuild out of its own body the portion of which it has been deprived. We must point to these formative forces objectively; not as hypotheses, assuming the existence of some sort of vital force, but as matters of fact. For if we observe exactly what occurs here, and follow its various stages, we have this result. For instance, take a frog, and remove a portion in a very early stage of development, the bulk of the mutilated organism replaces the amputated portion by growing it again. A critic of a materialistic turn of mind, will say; Oh yes, the wound is the seat of tonic forces, and through these the new growth is added. But this cannot be assumed.

Suppose that it were the case, and I were to remove a part of an organism, and a new part grows on the site of the injury (b) (See Diagram 7) through the tonic force (c) located here; then the new growth should strictly speaking be the immediately adjacent part, its neighbour in the intact and perfect organism. Actually, however, this does not happen; if portions of the larval frog are amputated, what grows from the site of the injury are extremities, tails or even heads; and in other creatures antennae. Not, that is to say, the strictly adjacent parts, but those of most use to the organism. Therefore, it is quite impossible that the normally adjacent structure develops at the point of amputation through the specially localised tonic forces; instead, we are obliged to assume that, in these re-growths or repairs, the whole organism takes part in some way.

And so it is really possible to trace what happens in lower organisms. As I have indicated the path to follow you can extend its application to all the cases recorded, and see in all of them, that one can only achieve a conception of the matter along this line of thought.

And in man, you will have to conclude, however, that things do not happen in this way. It would be extremely pleasant and convenient to be able to cut off a finger or an arm, in the certainty that it would be grown again! But this simply does not happen. And the question is: what becomes of those forces, growth forces, which show themselves unmistakably in the case of animals, when it comes to the human organism? Are they lost in it? or are they non-existent?

Anyone who can observe Nature objectively knows that only by this line of inquiry can we arrive at a sound conception of the link between physical and spiritual in man. For the forces we learnt to know as plastic formative forces, which mould forms straight from the living substance, are simply lifted out of the organs, and exist entirely in the soul and spiritual functions.

Because they have been so lifted, and are no longer within the organs as formative forces, man has them as separate forces, in the functions of soul and spirit. If I think or feel, I think and feel by virtue of the same forces that work plastically in the lower animals or the vegetable world. Indeed I could not think if I did not perform my thinking, feeling and willing with these same forces, which I have drawn out of matter. So, when I contemplate the lower organisms, I must say to myself; the power inherent in them, which manifests as a formative force, is the same as I carry within me; but I have drawn it out from my organs and hold it apart. I think and feel and will with the same powers that are formative and active plastically, in the lower organisms.

Anyone wishing to be a sound psychologist, whose statements have substance, and not mere words, as is usual today, would have so to follow up the processes of thinking, feeling and willing, as to show that the very same activities in the regions of soul and spirit manifest themselves on the lower level as plastic formative forces.

Observe for yourselves how we can achieve within the soul things we can no longer achieve within our organism. We can complete trains of thought that have escaped us by producing them out of others. Our activity here is quite similar to organic production; what appears first is not the immediately neighboring, but one lying far removed. There is a complete parallelism between what we experience inwardly through the soul, and the external formative forces and principles of Nature. There is a perfect correspondence between them. We must emphasise this correspondence, and show that man faces the same formative principles in the external world, as he has drawn from his own organism for the life of his soul and spirit, and which therefore in his own organism no longer underlie the substance.

Moreover, we have not drawn these elements in equal proportions from all parts. We can only approach the human organism properly, if we have first armed ourselves with the preliminary knowledge outlined here. For if you observe all the components of our nervous system, you will find the following peculiarity: what we are accustomed to term nerve-cells (neurons) and the nerve tissue, and so forth, develop comparatively slowly in the early stages of growth; they are not very advanced cellular formations. So that we might reasonably expect these so-called nerve-cells to display the characteristics of earlier primitive cellular structures yet, they do not do so at all. For instance, they are not capable of reproducing themselves; nerve-cells, like the cells of the blood, are indivisible. Thus we find that in a relatively early stage of evolution, they have been deprived of a capacity that belongs to cells external to man. They remain at an earlier stage of evolution; they are, so to speak, paralysed at this stage. What has been paralysed in them, separates off and becomes the soul and spirit element. So that, in fact, with our soul and spiritual processes we return to what was once formative in organic substance. And we are only able to attain to this because we bear in us the nervous substances which we destroy or at least cripple in a relatively early stage of growth.

In this way we can approach the inherent nature of the nerve substance. The result explains why this substance has the peculiarity both of resembling primitive forms, even in its later developments; and yet of serving what is usually termed the highest faculty of mankind, the activity of the spirit.

I will interpolate here a suggestion rather outside the subject we are at present considering. In my opinion, even a superficial observation of the human head with its various enclosed nerve centres, reminds one rather of lower forms than highly developed species of animal life, in that the nerve centres are enclosed in a firm armour of bone. The human head actually reminds us of prehistoric animals. It is only somewhat transformed. And if we describe the lower animal forms, we generally do so by referring to their external skeleton, whereas the higher animals and man have their bony structure inside. Nevertheless our head, our most highly evolved and specialised part, has an external skeleton. This resemblance is at least a sort of leit-motif for our preceding considerations.

Now let us suppose that we have occasion, because of some condition that we term disease, (I shall deal with this in more detail later) to bring back into our organism what has thus been removed. If we replace or restore these formative forces of external nature — of which we have deprived our organism because we use them for the soul and spirit — by means of a plant product or some other substance used as a remedy — we thereby reunite with the organism something that was lacking. We help the organism by adding and returning what we first took away in order to become human. Here you see the dawn of what can be termed the process of healing: the employment of those external forces of nature, not normally present in man, to strengthen some faculty or function. Take as an example — purely by way of illustration — a lung. Here too we shall find that we have drawn away formative principles to augment our soul and spiritual powers. If we discover among the products of the vegetable kingdom, the exact forces thus drawn from the lung and re-introduce them in a case of disturbance of the lung system, we help to restore that organ's activity. So the question arises; which forces of external nature are similar to the forces that underlie the human organs and have been extracted in the service of soul and spirit? Here you will find the path, leading from the method of trial and error in therapy, to a sort of “rationale” of therapy.

In addition to the errors fostered in respect of the nervous system — which refers to the inner human being — there is another very considerable error, regarding extra-human nature. This I will just touch on today and explain more fully later.

During the age of materialism, people accustomed themselves to think of a sort of evolution of natural objects, from the so-called simplest to the most complex. The lower organisms were first studied in their structural evolution, then the more complex; and then attention was directed to structures outside the organic realm, that is in the mineral kingdom. The mineral kingdom was envisaged merely as being simpler than the vegetable. This has led to all those strange questions and speculations, concerning the origin of life from the mineral kingdom, a changing over of substance occurring at some unknown point in time, from a merely inorganic to an organic activity. This was the Generation Aequivoca or spontaneous generation, which provoked so many controversies.

However an unbiased examination certainly does not confirm this view. On the contrary, we must put the following proposition to ourselves. In a way, just as we can conceive of a sort of evolution from plant life on through animal life to man, so it is not possible to conceive of another evolution, from organisms, in this case, plants, to the minerals, inasmuch as the latter are deprived of life. As I have said, this is only a hint which will be made clearer in later lectures. But we shall only avoid going astray here, if we do not think of evolution as ascending from the mineral through the vegetable and animal forms to mankind, but if we postulate a starting point in the center, as it were, with our evolutionary sequence ascending from plant through animal life to man, and another, descending to the mineral kingdom.

Thus the central point of departure would lie not in the mineral kingdom, but somewhere in the middle kingdoms of nature. There would be two trends of evolution, an upward and a downward. In this way we should come to perceive, in passing downwards from plant to mineral, and especially — as we shall see — to that particularly important mineral group, the metals, that in this descending evolutionary sequence, forces are manifest which have peculiar relationships to their opposites in the ascending trend of evolution. In short: what are those special forces inherent in mineral substances, which we can only study if we consider here the formative forces which we have studied in lower organic forms, and apply the same methods?

In mineral substances such formative forces manifest themselves in crystallisation. Crystallisation reveals quite definitely a factor in operation on the descending line of evolution that is in some manner interrelated — but not identical — with that which manifests as formative forces on the ascending line. Then if we bring to the living organism that force which inheres in mineral substances, a new question arises. We have already been able to answer a previous and similar inquiry: if we restore the formative forces that we have absorbed from our organism by our soul and spiritual activities by means of vegetable and animal substances, we help the organism thus treated. But what would be the effect of applying these other, different, forces coming from the descending evolutionary line, that is from the mineral world, to the human organism? This is the question which I will put to you today, and which will be answered in detail, in the course of our considerations.

But with all this, we have not yet been able to contribute anything of real help to the question at the forefront of our programme for today, viz: Can we gather by careful listening a healing process straight from nature itself?

Here it depends on whether we approach nature with real insight — and we have attempted to get at least an outline of such understanding — whether certain processes will reveal their inherent secret. There are two processes in the human organism — as also among animals, which are of less interest to us at the moment — which appear in a certain sense directly contrary to one another, when looked at in the light of the concepts with which we are now equipped. Moreover these two processes are to a great extent polar to one another; but not wholly so, and I lay special stress on this not wholly, so please bear it in mind to avoid misconstruction of my present line of argument. They are the formation of blood, and the formation of milk, as they take place in the human body.

Even externally and superficially these processes differ greatly. The formation of blood, is, so to speak, very deep seated and hidden in the recesses of the human organism. The formation of milk finally tends towards the surface. But the most fundamental difference is that the formation of blood is a process bearing very strong potentialities of itself, producing formative forces. The blood has the formative power in the whole domestic economy of the human organism, to use a commonplace expression. It has retained in some measure the formative forces we have observed in lower organisms. And modern science could base itself on something of immense significance, in the observation and study of the blood; but it has not yet done so in a rational manner. Modern science could base itself on the fact that the main constituents of blood are the red corpuscles, and that these again are not capable of reproducing themselves. They share this limitation of potentiality with the nerve-cells. But, in emphasising this attribute held in common, all depends on the cause; is the cause the same in both cases? It is not, for we have not extracted the formative forces from our blood to anything like the same extent as from our nerve substance. Our nerve substance is the basis of our mental life, and is greatly lacking in internal formative force. During the whole span of life from birth, the nerve substance of man is worked upon by or is dependent on external impressions. The internal formative force is superseded by the faculty of simple adaptation to external influences. Conditions are different in the blood, which has kept to a great extent its internal formative force. This internal formative force, as the facts show, is also present in a certain sense in milk; for if this were not so, we could not give milk to young babies, as the most wholesome form of nourishment. It contains a similar formative potentiality as the blood; in this respect both vital fluids have something in common.

But there is also a considerable difference. Milk has formative potentiality; but lacks a constituent that is most essential to blood, or has it only in the smallest quantity. This is iron, fundamentally the only metal in the human organism that forms such compounds within the organism as display the true phenomenon of crystallisation.

Thus, even if milk also contains other metals in minute amounts, there is this difference: that blood essentially requires iron, which is a typical metal. Milk, although also potentially formative, does not require iron as a constituent. Why does the blood need iron?

This is one of the crucial questions of the whole science of medicine. The blood actually needs iron (we shall sift and collect the material evidence for the facts I have sketched today). Blood is that substance of the human organism, which is diseased through its own nature, and must be continuously healed by iron. This is not the case with milk. Were it so, milk could not be a formative medium for mankind, as it actually is; a formative medium administered from outside.

When we study the human blood, we study something that is constantly sick, from the very nature of our constitution and organism. Blood by its very nature is sick and needs to be continuously cured by the addition of iron. This means that a continuous healing process is carried on within us, in the essential process of our blood. If the medical man is “a candidate for Nature's examination,” he must study first of all, not an abnormal but a normal process of nature. And the process essential to the blood is certainly “normal,” and at the same time a process in which nature itself must continually heal, and must heal by means of the administration of the requisite mineral, iron. To depict what happens to our blood by means of a graph, we must show the inherent constitution of blood itself, without any admixture of iron, as a curve or line sloping downwards, and finally arriving at the point of complete dissolution of the blood. (See Diagram 8, red). whereas the effect of iron in the blood is to raise the line continuously upwards as it heals. (yellow line).

There indeed we have a process which is both normal and a standard pattern to be followed if we want to think of the processes of healing. Here we can really pass Nature's examination, for we see how nature works, bringing the metal and its forces which are external to mankind, into the human frame. And at the same time, we learn how the blood, which needs must remain inside the human organism, must be healed and how what flows out of the human organism, namely milk does not need to be healed, but which if it has formative forces, can wholesomely transmit them to another organism. Here we have a certain polarity — and mark well, a certain, not a complete polarity — between blood and milk, which must have attention and observation, for we can learn very much from it.