Hygiene
— a Social Problem
By RUDOLF STEINER
Public lecture delivered by Rudolf Steiner in Dornach,
7th April, 1920.
IT is
never doubted that the Social Question is one of the problems that is
looming largest in the thought of the present age. Wherever there is
any understanding at all of the events that occur in the course of
the evolution of human history, of the sinister or incipiently
fruitful impulses for the future — all these matters are
included under the “Social Question.” It must, however,
be said that the point of view from which these social problems are
regarded and the way in which they are handled at the present time,
suffers from the basic evil inherent in so many spheres of our mental
and moral life — I mean the intellectualism obtaining in our
age. For these problems are indeed so often limited by the angle of
intellectualistic study. No matter whether the social question is
approached from the “left” or “right” wing,
the purely intellectualistic nature of the different conceptions is
revealed in the fact that people start from certain theories: this or
that ought to be done, this or that ought to be stamped out.
Little account is taken of
the human being himself. Human beings are treated just as if
there were one generality — “Man.” No attention is
paid to the personal and distinctive qualities of individual human
beings. And this is why our whole conception of the social question
has become abstract, so seldom grasping the social feelings and
sentiments playing between man and man. This lack of social
observation becomes most clearly evident when we turn to a special
domain like that of hygiene — a domain which possibly is more
prone than many others to be the subject of sociological study,
inasmuch as it is a public affair, concerning not the individual
human being alone but the whole of society.
True, there is no lack of
advice on the subject of hygiene, no lack of treatises and writings
on the subject of the care of health as a public concern. Yet one
cannot help asking: What is the real attitude of social life to all
these injunctions and regulations about hygiene? And the answer is,
that when the conclusions reached by medical or physiological science
on this matter are made public either by the written or by the spoken
word, it is the trust reposed by man in a
“profession,” the inner nature of which he is not able to
put to the test, which is supposed to be the basis upon which such
precepts may be accepted. Wide circles of people whose concern it is
— as indeed it is the concern of everyone — accept simply
on authority all that finds its way on the subject of hygiene, from
medical laboratories to the outside world. But those who are
convinced that in the course of modern history during the last four
centuries a longing has arisen among mankind for a democratic
ordering of affairs, find themselves faced with the entirely
undemocratic nature of this “trust in authority”
that is demanded in the sphere of hygiene. In short, this
undemocratic attitude confronts the longing for democracy which
has reached its height to-day, although frequently in a highly
contradictory form.
I know that what I have
just said may seem paradoxical, for people do not place the
unquestioning acceptance of everything related to the care of
health side by side with the democratic demand that affairs of public
interest concerning every mature man and woman shall be arbitrated by
the people in general, either directly or indirectly through their
representatives. True, it may be impossible to apply essentially
democratic principles in the sphere of public hygiene, because these
things depend on the judgment of specialists. But on the other hand
one cannot help asking: ought not an attempt be made to apply such
democratic principles as are possible in modern conditions to a
sphere like that of public health which so intimately concerns both
the individual and the community?
A great deal is said to-day
about the necessity for proper air, light, nourishment, sanitation,
and so forth, but the regulations laid down in regard to these things
cannot, as a rule, be tested by those to whom they apply. Now please
do not misunderstand me. I do not want to be accused in this lecture
of taking any particular side. I have no desire to uphold ancient
superstitions of devils and demons passing in and out of human beings
in the form of disease, nor to support the modern superstitions that
bacilli and bacteria cause the different diseases. We need not
consider to-day whether we are really faced with the results of the
spiritualistic superstitions of earlier times, or with the
superstitions of
materialism. I want rather to consider something that permeates the
whole culture of our age, especially in so far as this culture is
determined by the convictions of modern science. We are assured
to-day that the materialism of the middle and last third of the
nineteenth century has been overcome, but this statement does not
pass muster with those who really know the nature of materialism and
of its opposite. The most one can say is that materialism has been
overcome by a few people here and there. These people realise that
the facts of modern science no longer justify the general explanation
that everything in existence is merely a mechanical, physical or
chemical process taking place in matter. But the fact that a few
people here or there have come to this conclusion does not mean that
materialism has been overcome, for it is equally true that when it is
a question of concrete explanation or concrete thought, even these
people — and the others as a matter of course--still reveal a
materialistic tendency. True, it is said that atoms and molecules are
only convenient units of calculation (and here what is implied is
that atoms and molecules are made of the substance of thought)
— but the mode of observation is nevertheless atomistic and
molecular in character. When we are explaining world-phenomena
from the behaviour and relations of atomic and molecular processes,
the point is not whether we conceive any thought, feeling or activity
to be inseparable from material processes in atoms or molecules. The
point is the orientation of the attitude of our soul and
Spirit when our explanation is based upon the atomic theory —
the theory of smallest entities. The point is not whether
verbally or mentally a man is convinced that there is
something more than the material action of atoms, but whether his
mind and spirit can give explanations other than the atomic
basis of phenomena. In short, the essential thing is not what
we believe, but how we explain — in a word, our attitude
of soul. And here it must be said that only a true Anthroposophical
Spiritual Science can help to get rid of the evil of which I have
spoken.
I want to prove concretely
that this is so. There is hardly anything more confusing than the
distinctions which are so often emphasised to-day between man's
bodily nature and his nature of soul and Spirit, between physical
diseases and so-called psychical or mental diseases. The concrete
distinctions and relations between such facts of human life as a
diseased body and an apparently diseased soul, suffer from the
materialistic, atomistic mode of thought. For what is the real
essence of the materialism that has gradually come to be the
world-conception of so many modern men, and that far from being
overcome, is to-day in its prime? The essence of this materialism is
not that people observe the material processes in the body and
reverently study the marvellous structure and functions of the nerves
and other organs, but that the Spirit has departed from the study of
these material processes. People look into the world of matter and
see only matter and material processes.
What Spiritual Science must
emphasise, however, is briefly this: Wherever material processes are
presented to the senses — and these are the only processes
which modern science will admit as valid and exact — they are
but the outer manifestation, the outer revelation of active spiritual
forces lying behind and within them. Now it is not typical of
Spiritual Science to observe a human being and say: “There is
his physical body — a sum-total of material processes —
but he does not consist of this alone. Independently of this he has
an immortal soul.” It is far from being characteristic of a
spiritual conception of the world to speak like this and then build
up all manner of abstract, mystical theories about this immortal soul
that is independent of the body.
We can only be spiritual
scientists in the true sense when we realise that this material body,
with its material processes, is a creation of the Spirit and
soul. We must learn to understand in every detail the way in
which the soul and Spirit — which were there before birth, or
rather, before conception — are fashioning and moulding the
structure and the “material” processes of the human body.
We must be able to perceive the immediate unity of the body and the
soul-and-Spirit, and realise that through the working of these
principles the body as such is gradually destroyed. The body
undergoes a partial death with every moment that passes, but it is
only at actual death that there is a radical expression of what has
been happening to the body all the time, as a result of the working
of the soul-and-Spirit. We are not spiritual scientists in the true
sense until we have concrete realisation of this living interplay,
this living interaction between the soul and every single part of the
body, and are able to say: The soul and Spirit descend into concrete
processes, into the functions of liver, breathing, the action of
heart, brain and so forth. In short, when we are describing the
material part of man, we must know how to portray the body as
the direct offspring of Spirit. Spiritual Science is able to place a
true value on matter because, in the different concrete processes, it
does not merely observe what is there before the eye or conjectured
by the abstract concepts of modern science, but because it shows
how the Spirit works in matter, and it looks with reverence at
the material workings of the Spirit.
That is one essential
point. The other is that such a conception guards man against all the
abstract tittle-tattle about a soul independent of the bodily nature
— for so far as the life between birth and death is concerned,
man can only spin fantasies about this. Between birth and death (with
the exception of the time of sleep), the being of soul and Spirit is
so utterly given up to the bodily activities that it lives in
them, manifests in them. We must be able to observe the being of soul
and Spirit outside the range of earthly life, realising that
existence between birth and death is but the outcome of the soul and
Spirit. Then we can behold the actual unity of the soul and Spirit
with the physical elements of the body. This is Anthroposophical
Spiritual Science, for we know in very truth that the human being as
we perceive him with all his organs and structures has been created
by the soul and Spirit. Mystical and theosophical ideas may evolve
all manner of high-sounding theories about a spirituality that is
free of the body, but such ideas can never serve the concrete
sciences of life. They can only pander to an intellectualistic or
psychic craving which would like to be rid of outer life and then
weave fantasies about the soul and Spirit in order to induce a state
of inner satisfaction.
In this Anthroposophical
Movement of ours it behoves us to work earnestly and sincerely to
develop a Spiritual Science which will be able to bring life into
physics, mathematics, chemistry, physiology, biology, anthropology.
No purpose is served by making statements in a religious or
philosophical sense to the effect that man bears an immortal soul
within him, and then working in the different branches of science
just as if we were concerned merely with material processes.
Knowledge of the soul and Spirit must be applied to the very
details of life, to the marvellous structure of the body itself. You
will come across many mystics and theosophists who love to
chatter about man being composed of physical body, etheric body,
astral body and Ego. And yet they have no idea what a wonderful
manifestation of soul-life it is when one blows one's nose! The point
is that we must see in matter a manifestation of the Spiritual. Then
we have healthy ideas of the Spirit — ideas that are full of
content, and with them a Spiritual Science that may be fruitful for
all the ordinary sciences of life.
This again will make it
possible to overcome elements which, on account of the materialistic
trend of scientific knowledge, have led to specialisation in the
various branches of science. Now I have no desire whatever to deliver
a philippic against specialisation, for I am well aware of its
usefulness. Certain domains of life must be dealt with by specialists
simply because they need a specialised technique. The point I would
make is that a man who holds fast to the material can never reach a
conception of the world applicable to the practical details of life
when he becomes a specialist in the ordinary sense. For the range of
material processes is infinite, both outside in Nature and within the
human being. We may devote a long time — as long at any rate as
professional people devote to their training to the study of
the nervous system in man, for instance, but if material processes
are all that we see in the working of the nervous system —
processes which are then described according to the abstract concepts
of modern science — we shall never be led to any universal
principle or to anything upon which a conception of the world can be
based. Directly we begin to study the nervous system in the sense of
Spiritual Science we shall inevitably find that the Spirit we see
active there, leads us to the soul and Spirit underlying the systems
of muscles, bones and senses and so forth. For the Spirit does not
“separate off” into single parts as does the material.
Very briefly expressed, the Spirit unfolds like an organism.
Just as we cannot truly study a human being if we merely look at his
five fingers and cover the rest of him up, so in Spiritual Science we
cannot observe a single detail without being led by the soul and
Spirit within this detail, to a Whole. If we should happen to
become brain or nerve specialists, we should then still be able, in
observing the single part, to form a picture of the human being as
a whole. We should reach a universal principle able to form part
of a conception of the world, and then we could begin to speak
of specialised subjects in a way intelligible to every
healthy-minded, reasonable human being.
This is the great
difference between the way in which Spiritual Science is able to
speak about the human being and the way in which materialistic
science is bound, by its very nature, to speak. If as men and women
who in the ordinary course of things do not know very much about the
nervous system, you try to read a scientific text-book on the
subject, you will probably soon lay it aside. At all events you will
not learn much that will help you to realise the worth and dignity of
the being of man. If, however, you listen to what Spiritual Science
has to say about the nervous system you are everywhere led to the
whole being of man. Such illumination is cast on the nature of
man that the idea arising within you suggests the worth, the essence
and the dignity of the human being.
We realise the truth of
this not so much when we are observing merely a single part of the
healthy human being, but when we are observing the man who is ill
— where there are so many deviations from the so-called normal
condition. Now if we can observe the whole human being under
the influence of some disease, all that Nature reveals to us in the
sick man leads us deeply into cosmic connections. We understand the
particular constitution of this human being, how the
atmospheric and extra-earthly influences are working on him as the
result of his particular constitution, and we are then able to
relate his organisation to the various substances of Nature
that will have a remedial effect. When we add to our understanding of
the healthy man all we learn from observation of the
sick man, profound insight into the deeper connections and
meaning of life will arise.
And such insight becomes in
turn the foundation for a knowledge of man that is intelligible to
everyone. True, we have not as yet accomplished very much in this
direction, for Spiritual Science as we intend it, has only been in
existence for a short time. The lectures given here [Dr. Steiner is referring to a number of lectures given by various
scientists during the Medical Course at the Goetheanum.]
therefore must only be thought of as a beginning. But, by its very
nature, Spiritual Science is able to work upon and develop what is
contained in the several sciences in such a way that a knowledge
which everyone ought to possess of the being of man, can really be
offered to the world.
And now think what it will
mean if Spiritual Science succeeds in transforming science in this
way — succeeds in developing forms of knowledge relating to men
in health and disease that are accessible to ordinary human
consciousness. If Spiritual Science succeeds in this, how
different will be the relations of one human being to another in
social life! There will be far greater understanding in the
relation of human beings to each other than there is to-day when men
pass each other by without either having the slightest understanding
of the individuality of the other. The social question will be lifted
away from its intellectualistic character when the several branches
of life are based upon objective knowledge and concrete
experience. This applies very specially to the domain of health and
the care of health. Think of the effect which a true understanding of
health and disease in our fellow-men would have in social life. Think
what it would mean if the care of health were taken in hand by the
whole of humanity with understanding! Of course there must be no
scientific or medical dilettantism — most emphatically not. But
if understanding for the health and ill-health of our fellow-beings
can be awakened — understanding that grows from a true
conception of man think of the effect it would have in social life.
Then indeed it would be realised that social reform and
reconstruction must proceed in their different branches from real
knowledge and not from Marxian theories and the like. Such
theories lose sight of the human being as such, and want to organise
the world on the basis of purely abstract concepts. Healing can never
spring from abstract concepts, but only from a true knowledge of the
different spheres of life. And hygiene, the care of health, is a very
important domain, for it leads us immediately to all the joy that
falls to the lot of our fellow-men when their mode of life is healthy
and to their sufferings and limitations when the elements of disease
lie within them.
When those who are
concerned in developing a knowledge of man in health and disease, and
those who actually become doctors, have this attitude towards social
life, they will be able to shed light on its problems, for they will
have true understanding. The position of the doctor nowadays is that
those who are not his personal friends or relatives go to his surgery
to fetch him when someone is in pain or has broken a leg. When men
have knowledge of the kind I have described, the doctor will be a
teacher who is continually giving instruction and indicating means
for prophylactic hygiene. The doctor will not only be called in to
heal when disease has reached a point where men realise they
are ill, but he will always be working to keep them healthy —
so far as this is possible. In short there will be a living,
social relationship between the doctors and the rest of the
community. And, moreover, this healthy influence will make itself
felt in the domain of Medicine itself.
For the very reason that
materialism has also spread into the medical conception of life, we
have developed extraordinary ideas about illness. On the one side we
are faced with all the physical diseases. They are investigated by
observing the different organs, or the various processes which are
thought to be of a physical nature and are to be found within the
confines of the human skin. Then the goal is to seek to rectify what
is wrong. In this case, thought about the body of men in its normal
and abnormal conditions is wholly materialistic.
Then there are so-called
psychical or mental diseases. As a result of materialistic thinking
these are considered to be diseases of the brain or nervous system,
although efforts have been made to find the causes in other organic
systems of the human being. But because people are quite ignorant of
the way in which the Spirit and soul work in the healthy body, they
are unable to connect these diseases of the Spirit and soul in a
rational way with what is actually taking place in the human
organism.
Spiritual Science is able
to show in every detail how all so-called mental and psychical
disease has its source in disturbances of the organs, in
enlargements and contractions of the organs in man. A so-called
mental or psychical disease is always the result of some irregularity
in an organ, in the heart, the liver, the lungs and so on. A
Spiritual Science that has developed to the point of knowing how the
Spirit acts in a normal heart, is also able to discover in the
deterioration or irregularity of the heart, the cause of a diseased
life of Spirit or soul.
The greatest fault of
materialism is not that it denies the existence of the Spirit.
Religion can see to it that due recognition is paid to the Spirit.
The greatest sin of materialism is that it gives us no knowledge
of matter because, in effect, it only observes the outer side of
matter. What is lacking in materialism is that it has no insight into
matter! Take, for instance, psycho-analytical treatments, where
attention is wholly directed to something that has taken place
in the soul and is described as a “complex” — a
pure abstraction. Whereas the right way to proceed is to study how
certain impressions which have been made on the soul of the human
being at some period of his life and which are normally bound up with
a healthy organism, have come into contact with defective
organs, with a diseased instead of a healthy liver, for example.
And it must be remembered that this may have happened a very long
time before the moment when the defect becomes organically
perceptible.
There is no need for
Spiritual Science to be afraid of showing how so-called mental or
psychical disease is invariably connected with some organic
phenomenon or other in the body of man. Spiritual Science must show
with all emphasis that when a “soul-complex” — a
deviation from the so-called “normal life of soul”
— is studied, the most that can be achieved is a one-sided
diagnosis. Psycho-analysis, therefore, can never lead to anything
more than a diagnosis, never to a real therapy in this domain. In
mental or spiritual diseases therapy must proceed to administer a
cure for the body and for this reason there must be exact
knowledge of the ramifications of the Spiritual in the
material. We must know where to take hold of the material body (which
is permeated with Spirit) in order to cure the disease of which
abnormal conditions of soul are but the symptoms. Again and again it
must be emphasised by Spiritual Science that the root of so-called
mental or psychical diseases lies in the organic system of the
human being. But it is only possible to understand abnormal
organology when the Spirit can be traced in the most minute parts of
matter.
And again: phenomena of
life which seemingly affect or function in the element of soul, all
that is expressed in the different temperaments, for instance, and
the activity of the temperaments in the human being, in the way in
which the tiny child acts, plays, walks — all this is to-day
merely studied from a “psychological” point of view, but
it also has its bodily aspect. Faulty education of the child
may come to expression in later life in the form of some familiar
physical disease. In certain cases of mental trouble we must often
study the bodily constitution and look for the cause there, and again
in certain cases of physical diseases, we must study the Spiritual
before we can find the cause. The whole essence of Spiritual Science
is that it does not speak in abstractions of a nebulous Spirit, like
people of a mystical or theosophical turn of mind, but traces the
Spirit right down into its material workings. Spiritual
Science never conceives of the material in the sense of modern
science but always presses on to the Spirit, and so it realises that
an abnormal soul-life must inevitably express itself in an abnormal
bodily life, although the abnormality may, to begin with, be hidden
from external observation. On all sides to-day people form entirely
false ideas of true Anthroposophical Spiritual Science and there may
be a certain justification for this when they listen to speeches of
those who do not seriously penetrate to the heart of the teaching but
give utterance to abstract theories — man consists of such and
such, there are repeated earthly lives, and so forth. All these
things are of course full of significance and beauty, but the point
is that we must penetrate to the heart of the particular subjects and
the various spheres of life of which we speak.
In the very widest sense,
the Spiritual-Scientific mode of thinking leads to a social, communal
consciousness among men. For when people are able to perceive, on the
one hand, how a soul that is sick sends its impulses into the
organism, when they really understand the connection between the
organism and the soul that is sick, and when they know how the
general ordering of life affects the health of human beings —
then the position of each individual in the community will be quite
different. A true understanding of his fellow-creatures will arise in
man and he will treat them quite differently. He will make allowances
for the particular characters of those around him, knowing that the
one possesses certain qualities and the other quite different
qualities. He will learn how to respond to all the variations, how to
make the best use of the different temperaments in human society and
above all how to unfold and develop them in the true sense.
One domain of life in
particular will be healthily influenced by such a knowledge of human
nature — I refer to the domain of education. Without a
comprehensive knowledge of the human being we simply cannot, for
instance, measure the consequences of allowing our children to sit in
school with bent backs so that they never breathe properly, or never
teaching them to utter the vowel and consonant sounds clearly and
definitely. As a matter of fact, the whole of later life depends on
whether the child at school breathes in the right way and
whether it is taught to articulate clearly and consciously. This is
merely said by way of example, for the same thing applies in other
domains. It is, however, an illustration of the application of
general hygienic principles in the sphere of education. The whole
social significance of hygiene is revealed in this example.
It is also apparent that
instead of further specialisation, life is calling out for the
specialised branches of knowledge to be brought together to form a
comprehensive conception of life. We need something
more than educational rules according to which the teacher is
supposed to instruct the child. We need something that makes the
teacher realise what it means if he helps the child to speak
articulately and clearly, or the consequences that will ensue if he
allows the child to catch its breath after only half a sentence or
line has been spoken, and does not see to it that all the air is used
up while the sentence is being uttered.
There are of course many
such principles. A right appreciation and practice of them will only
develop when we are able to measure their full significance for human
life and social health — for only then will they give rise to a
social impulse.
We need teachers who are
able to educate children on the basis of a conception of the world
that understands the true being of man. This was the
thought underlying the Course I gave to the teachers when the Waldorf
School at Stuttgart was founded. All the principles of the art of
education as expounded in that Course strive in the direction of
making men and women out of the children who are being educated
— men and women in whom lungs, liver, heart, stomach, will be
healthy in later life because, in childhood, they were helped to
develop their life-functions in the right way, because, in effect,
the soul worked in the right way. This conception of the world
will never give a materialistic interpretation of the old saying,
Mens sana in corpore sano. Interpreted in the materialistic
sense this means: If the body is healthy, if it has been made healthy
by all kinds of physical methods, then it will of itself be the
bearer of a healthy soul. Now this is pure nonsense. The only real
meaning of the phrase is this: a healthy body bears witness to the
fact that the force of healthy soul has built it up, moulded it, made
it healthy. A healthy body proves that a healthy soul has worked
within it. That is the right interpretation of the phrase — and
only in this sense can it be a principle of true hygiene.
In other words: it is not
enough to have, as well as the school teachers who are working merely
from an abstract science of education, a school doctor who turns up
perhaps once a fortnight, goes through the school and has no idea how
really to help. No, what we need is a living connection between
medical science and the art of education. We need an art of education
that teaches and instructs the children in a way conducive to real
health. This is the element that makes hygiene a social question. For
the social question is essentially an educational question,
and this in turn a medical question — but only in the sense of
a medicine, of a hygiene permeated with Spiritual Science.
These things lead us on to
something else of extraordinary significance in our theme. For
when we really enter Spiritual Science, when it becomes concrete in
us, we know that we receive from it something more than the
intellectualism of natural science, history or jurisprudence.
(All sciences to-day are intellectualistic; even if they claim to be
based on practical experience this simply means that they interpret
intellectually the results of the experiences of the senses.) Now the
content of Spiritual Science differs essentially from these
intellectualistic results of natural science and other branches of
modern culture. We should be in a sorry plight if all that lives in
our intellectualistic culture were not merely a picture but an actual
power working deeply into human beings. Intellectualism remains
merely on the surface of man's being — and I use this phrase in
its comprehensive sense. There are people who only study Spiritual
Science intellectually, who make mental notes — there is a
physical body, etheric body, astral body, Ego, reincarnation, karma
and the like. They put it all into pigeon holes as is the custom in
modern natural or social science but they are not sincerely devoting
themselves to Spiritual Science when they think like this. They are
simply carrying over their ordinary mode of thought to what they find
in Spiritual Science. The essential thing about Spiritual Science is
that it must be conceived, felt and experienced not in an
intellectualistic way, but quite differently. It is for this reason
that by its very nature Spiritual Science has a living, vital
relation to the human being in health and disease, but a relation
altogether different from what is often imagined.
People must by now have
realised to their cost the powerlessness of purely intellectual
culture to deal with those who are suffering from so-called mental
disease. The sufferer will tell you, for instance, that he hears
voices speaking to him. No matter what intellectual reasoning you use
with him — it is all useless, for he will know how to make all
manner of objections. You may be sure of that! Even this might be an
indication that in such a case one has to do, not with a disease of
the conscious or unconscious life of soul but with a disease of the
organism. Spiritual Science teaches, moreover, that one cannot get to
grips with these so-called mental and psychical diseases by the kinds
of methods that have recourse, for instance, to hypnotism, suggestion
and the like, but that one must approach mental disease by
“physical” means — by healing the organs of man,
and this is exactly where a spiritual knowledge of the human being is
all-essential, Spiritual knowledge recognises that so-called mental
diseases cannot be affected by methods that are of a
“spiritual” or “psychical” nature, because,
in effect, this kind of illness arises from the fact that the
spiritual member of man's being has been pressed outwards (as is
otherwise the case only in sleep). As a consequence, the spiritual
member is weak and we must proceed to cure the bodily organ in order
that the soul and Spirit may be received into it again in a healthy
way.
Now Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition
[The three higher modes of cognition as described by
Dr. Steiner in many lectures and writings. Ed.]
— which
proceed, not from the intellect alone but from the whole being
of man as the outcome of Spiritual Science — penetrate into the
whole organism. In short, true Spiritual Science penetrates with
health-bringing force into the physical organisation of
man.
The fact that certain
dreamy people feel ill or showsigns of the reverse of health in their
spiritual-scientificactivities is no proof that this statement is
false. There are so many who are not really spiritual scientists at
all but who simply amass with their intellects collectionsof notes
upon the results of Spiritual Science. The promulgation of the
real substance of Spiritual Science is in itself a social
hygiene, for it works upon the whole being of man and regularises
his organic functions when they show signs of deviating from the
normal either to the side of morbid dreaming or the reverse. Here we
have the essential difference between the content of Spiritual
Science and that of merely intellectualistic science. The concepts
arising in the domain of intellectualism are muchtoo
“bloodless” — because they are merely analogies to
get to grips with the being of man and work healthily upon him. The
concepts of Spiritual Science, on the other hand, have themselves
arisen from a knowledge of the whole being of man. Lungs, heart,
liver the whole being and not the brain alone — have
collaborated in the building up of spiritual-scientific concepts.
Inherentwithin them, penetrating them with a plastic formativeforce,
are elements which proceed from the whole beingof man. And this is
the sense in which Spiritual Sciencecan enter and give direction to
hygiene as a social concern.
In many other ways too
— for I can only indicate certain examples — Spiritual
Science will be able, when it gains a firm footing in the world, to
lay down guiding lines for the life of humanity in the sphere of
health.
Let me here give just one
brief indication. The great difference between the human organisation
in waking and sleeping life is one of the subjects to which Spiritual
Science has again and again to return. Howthe Spirit and soul act in
waking life, how and when they permeate each other in the body, soul
and Spirit of man — how they act when they are temporarily
separated fromeach other in sleep — all these things are
conscientiously studied by Spiritual Science. Here I can do no more
than refer to a certain principle, but it is nevertheless a
well-founded deduction of Spiritual Science.
Certain epidemics
appear in life — illnesses that affect whole masses of the
population and are therefore essentially a social concern. Ordinary
materialistic science studies these illnesses by examining the
physical organism of man. It knows nothing of the tremendous effect
which the abnormal attitude of human beings to waking and sleeping
life has upon epidemics and the susceptibility
to epidemic diseases. Certain things take place in
the organism during sleep and if they run to excess, they strongly
predispose the human being to so-called epidemic diseases. Men and
women who set organic processes in action as the result of too much
sleep — I mean processes that ought not to take place, because
waking life must not be broken up by such lengthy periods of sleep
— these people have a much stronger predisposition to epidemic
diseases and are less able to resist them.
Now you can well realise
what it would mean to explain the right proportions of sleeping and
waking life. These things cannot be dictated. You can of course tell
people that they must not send children with scarlatina to school,
but you cannot tell them in the same way that they ought to get, say,
seven hours of sleep. And yet it is much more important than any
prescription, that people who need it should have seven hours of
sleep and others for whom this is not necessary, should sleep much
less — and so forth.
These matters, which are so
intimately connected with the personal life of human beings, have a
very great bearing and effect upon social life. How the social
effects come about, whether a larger or smaller number of people are
obliged owing to illness to be absent from their work, whether or not
a whole region is affected — all these things depend upon the
most intimate details of man's life. Hygiene here plays an
immeasurably important part in social life. No matter what people may
think about infection or non-infection — this element is none
the less a factor in epidemics. And here external regulations are of
no avail; the only thing that will avail is to educate, within human
society, men and women who are able to meet the doctors who are
trying to explain prophylactic measures, with understanding.
This can give rise to an active co-operation for the preservation of
health between the doctors who understand the technique of their
profession, and the laity who understand the nature of the
human being. ... It is, of course, not the laity nor the amateurs who
will do the healing, but reasonable human beings will bring
understanding to meet the professional medical men who tell them this
or that. If he understands the human being — and this
understanding can be developed in social life in collaboration with
the doctor — the layman can form an intelligent idea of
technical science and then, in democratic Parliaments he can say
“Aye” with a certain understanding and not because of the
pressure of authority. The sphere of hygiene can become a
social concern in the true sense if it is made fruitful by a science
of medicine enriched by Spiritual Science. In short, hygiene can
become in the real sense, and to a high degree, an affair of the
people, of the democracy.
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