VI
The
Nose
Smell and Taste
As you
recall, gentlemen, last time we talked about the eye, and we
were particularly impressed with its marvellous configuration.
Even in regard to its external form, the eye reproduces a whole
world. When we become acquainted with the interior of the eye,
the way we did the last time, we discover that there is
indeed a miniature world within. That I have explained to you,
and thus we have become familiar with two senses of man, sight
and hearing.
Now,
in connection with other questions you have recently posed, we
shall see that a particularly fascinating and interesting
human sense is that of smell. This sense appears to be of minor
importance in man but, as you know, it is of great significance
in the dog. You could say that all the intelligence of the dog
is, in fact, transferred to the sense of smell. You need only
consider how much the animal can accomplish by smell. A dog
recognizes people by smell long after it has been with them.
Anyone who observes dogs knows that they recognize and identify
somebody with whom they have been acquainted, not by the sense
of sight, but by that of smell. If you have heard recently how
dogs can become excellent detectives and search for
lawbreakers or for people in general, you will say to
yourselves that here the sense of smell accomplishes rare
things that naturally appear simple but are in actuality not so
simple at all. You need only consider these matters to realize
that they are not so simple.
“Well,” you may say casually, “the dog merely
follows the scent.” Yes, gentlemen, that is true, the dog
does indeed follow the scent. But think about it. Police dogs
are used to follow, say, first the track of thief X and then
the track of thief Y, one right after the other. The two scents
are completely different from each other; if they were
alike the dog could naturally never be able to follow them.
Imagine now that you had to point out the difference between
these tracks that the dogs distinguish by smell; you would
discover no significant difference. The dog, however, does
detect differences. The point is not that the dog follows
the tracks back and forth in general but that it is capable of
distinguishing between the various traces of scent. That,
indeed, indicates intelligence.
There
is yet another extremely important consideration. Civilized men
use their sense of smell for foods and other external
things, but it doesn't inform them of much else. In contrast,
primitive tribes in Africa can smell out their enemies at far
range, just as a dog can detect a scent. They are warned of
their foes by smell. Thus, the intelligence that is found in
such great measure in the dog is also found to a certain degree
among primitive people. The member of a primitive tribe in
Africa can tell long before he has seen his adversary that he
is approaching; he distinguishes him from other people with his
nose. Imagine how delicate one's sense of discernment in the
nose must be if by that one can know that an enemy is nearby.
Also, Africans know how to utter a certain warning sound that
Europeans cannot make at all. It is a clicking sound, somewhat
like the cracking of a whip.
It can
be said that the more civilized a man becomes, the more
diminished is the importance of his sense of smell. We can use
this sense to ascertain whether we are dealing with a less
developed species like the canine family — and they are a
lower species — or one more developed. If we were to
follow up on this, we would probably make some priceless
discoveries about hogs, which, of course, have an exceptionally
strong sense of smell.
There
is something else in regard to this that will interest you. The
elephant is reputed to be one of the most intelligent animals,
and it certainly is; the elephant is a highly intelligent
animal. Well, what feature is particularly well-developed in
the elephant? Look at the area above the teeth in the dog and
the pig, the area that in man forms itself into the nose. When
you picture an especially strong and pronounced
development of this part, you arrive at the elephant's
trunk. The elephant possesses what is nose in us to a
particularly pronounced degree, and therefore it is the
most intelligent animal. The extreme intelligence of the
elephant does not depend on the size of the brain but on its
extension straight into the nose.
All
these facts challenge us to ask how matters stand in respect to
the human nose, an organ that civilized man today does
not really know too much about. Of course, he is familiar with
its anatomy and structure, but basically, he does not know much
more than the fact that it sits in the middle of his face. Yet,
the nose, with its continuation into the brain, is actually a
most interesting organ. If you will recall my descriptions of
the ear and the eye, you will say to yourselves that they are
complicated. The nose, however, is not so complicated, but it
is quite ingenious.
Seen
from the front, the nose has a wall in the middle, the septum.
This can be felt when you hold your nose. The septum divides
the nose into a left and a right side, and to the left and the
right are the actual parts of this organ. From the front it
looks like this (sketching). The cribriform plate is located in
the skull bone up where the nose sits between the eyes. It is
like a little sieve. In other words, it is a bone with many
holes. It is intricate but in my drawing I shall simplify it.
On the exterior, the nose has skin like the skin on the rest of
the body; inside, it is completely lined and filled out with a
mucous membrane. This is everywhere in the nose, a fact that
you can readily confirm. This membrane secretes mucus; if you
did not have it, you would not have to blow your nose. So,
inside the nose is a membrane that secretes mucus, but the
matter is more complicated. You will have noticed that children
who cry secrete a lot of nasal mucus. A canal in the upper part
of the nose leads to the tear glands, which are located on both
sides in the interior. There the secretion, the tears, enters
the nose and mixes with the nasal mucus. Thus, the nose has a
kind of “fluidic connection” with the eyes. The
secretion of the eyes flows into the mucous membrane and
combines with the secretion of the nose. This connection shows
us again that no organ in the body is isolated. The eyes are
not only for seeing; they can also cry, and what they then
discharge mixes with what is primarily secreted in the membrane
of the nose.
The
olfactory nerve, the actual nerve used for smelling, passes
through the cribriform plate, which is located at the roof of
the nose. This nerve has two fibres that pass from the brain
through the sieve-like bone and spread out within the nose. The
mucous membrane, which we can touch with our finger, is
interlaced by the olfactory nerve, which reaches into the
brain. We can easily discern that because the nose is
constructed quite simply.
Now we
come to something that can reveal much to one who thinks
sensibly. You see, a thorough examination will show that no one
has eyes of equally strong vision, and when we examine the two
hands we readily discover that they are not of equal strength.
The organs of the human being are never completely equal in
strength on both the left and right side. So it is also with
the nose. Generally, we simply do not smell as well with the
left nostril as with the right, but it is the same here as it
is with the hand; some individuals are better at smelling with
the left nostril than with the right, just as some people are
left-handed. As you know, some people in the world are
screwed together the wrong way. I am not referring to those
people whose heads are screwed on wrong [(A play on words. In
German, a “Querkopf' is a person who is odd. Rudolf
Steiner then uses the term “Querherz” to indicate
the anatomical oddity of the heart.)] but to those whose hearts
are screwed on the wrong way. In the average person, the heart
is located slightly off-centre to the left, as are the rest of
the internal organs. Now, in a person whose heart is screwed on
the wrong way, as it were, whose heart is off-centre a bit to
the right, the stomach is also pushed over slightly to the
right. Such a person is all “screwed up,” but this
phenomenon is indeed less noticeable than when one is screwed
up in the head. The fact becomes apparent when a person has
fallen ill or has been dissected. Autopsies first led to the
discovery that there are such odd people whose hearts and
stomachs are shifted to the right. Of course, since not
everyone who is queer in the head is dissected after
death, one often doesn't even know that there are many more
such “odd people” than is normally assumed whose
hearts are off-centre to the right.
A
truly effective pedagogy must take this into
consideration. When dealing with a child who does not
have its heart in the right place, speaking strictly
anatomically, this must be taken into account; otherwise, it
can have awkward consequences for the youngster. Because
man is not just a physical apparatus, he does not
necessarily have to be educated in such a way that
abnormalities like this have to become an obstacle. Taking such
aspects into consideration is what truly makes pedagogy an
art.
A
Professor Benedikt has examined the brains of many criminals.
In Austria this was frowned upon because the people there are
Catholics and they see to it that such things are not done.
Benedikt was a professor in Vienna. He got in touch with
officials in Hungary, where at one time there were more
Calvinists, and he was given permission to transport the
heads of executed criminals to Vienna. Several things then
happened to him. There was a really ruthless killer who had I
don't know how many murders on his conscience and who
also had religious faith. He was a devout Catholic. When a
rumour broke out that the brains of criminals were being
sent to Professor Benedikt in Vienna, this criminal who was a
cold-blooded murderer protested. He did not want his head sent
to the professor because he didn't know where he would look for
it to piece it together with the rest of his body when the dead
arise on Judgment Day. Even though he was a hardened criminal,
he did believe in Judgment Day.
So
what did Professor Benedikt find in the brains of criminals? In
the back of our heads we have a “little brain,” the
cerebellum, which I shall speak about later on. It is covered
by a lobe of the “large brain,” the cerebrum. It
looks like a small tree (drawing). On top it is covered by the
cerebrum and the occipital lobe. Now, Professor Benedikt
discovered that in people who have never committed murder or a
theft — and there are such people — the occipital
lobe extends down to here (drawing), whereas in those who
had been murderers or other criminals the lobe did not extend
so far; it did not cover the cerebellum below.
A
malformation like that is naturally congenital; a person
is born with it. And, gentlemen, there are a great many people
born with an occipital lobe that is too small to properly
cover the cerebellum! It can be made up for by education,
however. Nobody has to become a killer because he has a shorter
occipital lobe; he becomes a criminal only if he is not
properly educated. From this you can see that if the body is
not correctly developed one can compensate for it with the
forces of the soul. Therefore, it is nonsense to say that a
person cannot help becoming a criminal — which is what
the otherwise brilliant professor stated — because
as an embryo he was incorrectly positioned in the mother's womb
and thus did not properly develop the occipital lobe. He might
be quite well-educated by accepted standards, but he is not
properly educated in regard to such an abnormality. Of course,
he cannot help the inadequacies of education, but society can
help it; society must see to it that the matter is handled
correctly in education. I mention this so you may realize
the great significance of the whole organization of man.
Let us
return again to the subject of the dog. We must admit that in
the dog the nose is especially well-developed. Now, gentlemen,
what do we actually smell? What does a dog really smell? If you
take a bit of substance like this piece of chalk, you will not
smell it. You will be able to smell it only if the substance is
set on fire, and the ingredients evaporate to be received into
the nose as vapor. You cannot even smell liquid substances
unless they first evaporate. We smell only what has first
evaporated. Also, there must be air around us with which the
vapours from substances can mix. Only when substances have
become vaporous can we smell them; we cannot smell anything
else. Of course, we do smell an apple or a lily, but it is
nonsense to say that we smell the solid lily. We smell the
fragrance arising from the lily. When the vapor-like scent of
the lily wafts in our direction, then the nerve in the nose is
able to experience it.
What a
primitive tribesman smells of his enemy are his evaporations.
You can conclude from this that a man's presence makes itself
felt much farther than his hands can reach. If we were
primitive people and one of us were down in Arlesheim, he would
know if an adversary of his were up here among us. This would
mean that his foe would have to make his being felt all the way
down to Arlesheim! (Arlesheim is about 154 miles from Dornach.)
Indeed, all of you extend to Arlesheim by virtue of what you
evaporate. On account of a man's perspirations, something of
himself extends a good distance around himself, and through
that he is present to a greater degree than through what one
can see externally.
Now,
the dog does something interesting that man cannot do.
All of you are quite familiar with it. If somewhere you meet a
dog you know well and that is equally well-acquainted with you,
the animal will wag its tail because it is glad to see you.
Yes, gentlemen, why does it wag its tail? Because it
experiences joy? A man cannot wag his tail when he is happy,
because he does not have one anymore. In this regard man has
become stunted, insofar as he has no way to immediately lend
expression to his joy. The dog, however, smells the person and
wags its tail. On account of the scent, the dog's whole body
reaches a state of excitement that is expressed by the
tail muscles receiving the experience of gladness. In this
respect man has reached the stage where he lacks such an organ
with which he could express his joy in this way.
We see
that while man is more cultivated than dogs, he lacks the
ability to drive the sensation of smell down his spinal cord.
The dog can do this; the scent enters its nose and is
transmitted down the spinal cord, and then the dog wags its
tail. What enters its nose as scent travels down the spinal
cord. The end of the spine is the tail, and so it wags it. Man
cannot do that and I shall tell you why he cannot. Man also
possesses a spinal cord, but he cannot transmit a scent through
it. Now, I shall draw the whole head of the human being in
profile (diagram). The spinal cord continues down on the left.
In the case of the dog it becomes the tail, which the animal
can wag. Man, however, turns the force of his spinal cord in
the other direction. Indeed, he has the capacity to change many
things around, something that the animals cannot do. Thus,
animals walk on all fours, or if they do not, as in the case of
some monkeys, it is all the worse for them. They are actually
organized to walk on all fours. But the human being raises
himself up. At first man too walks on all fours, but then he
stands erect. The force through which he accomplishes this and
that passes through the spinal cord is the same force that
pushes the whole brain forward. It is actually quite
interesting to see a dog wag its tail. If a human being
compared himself to the dog, he can exclaim, “Isn't that
something; it can wag its tail, and I cannot!”
The
whole force that is contained in this wagging tail,
however, has been dammed back by man, and it has pushed
the brain forward. In the dog it grows backward, not forward.
The force that the dog possesses in its tail we turn around and
lead into the brain. You can picture to yourselves how this
really works by realizing that at the end of the spine, where
we have the so-called tail bone, is the coccyx, which consists
of several atrophied vertebrae. In the dog they are well-formed
and developed; in us they are a fused and completely
stunted protrusion that we can no longer wag. It ends here and
is covered by skin. Now, we are able to turn this whole
“wagging ability” around, and if in fact the top of
the skull were not up here (b), upon smelling a pleasant odour
we could wag with our brain, as it were. If our skull bones did
not hold it together, we would actually wag with our brain
toward the front when we are glad to see somebody.
You
see, this is what marks the human organization; it reverses
that function found in the animals. This tail wagging
ability is still developed but it is reversed. In reality, we
too wag something, and some people have a sensitivity for
perceiving it. Isn't it true that court officials fawn and
cringe in the royal presence? Of course, theirs is not a
wagging like that of a dog, but some people still get the
feeling that they are really wagging their tails. This is
because their wagging is on the soul level and indeed looks
like tail wagging. If one has acquired clairvoyance —
something that is easily misunderstood but that merely
consists of being able to see some things better than others
— then, gentlemen, one does not just have the feeling
that a courtier is wagging his tail in front of a personage of
high rank; one actually sees it. He does not wag something in
the back, but he does indeed wag something in the front. Of
course, the solid substances within the brain are held together
by the skull bones, but what is developed there in the form of
delicate substantiality, as warmth, wags when a courtier is
standing before royalty. It fluctuates. Now it is warm, now a
little cooler, warmer, cooler. Someone with a delicate
sensitivity for this fluctuating warmth, who is standing
in the presence of courtiers surrounding the Lords, sees
something that looks like a fool's cap wagging back and forth
in front. It is correct to say that the etheric body, the more
delicate organization of man, is wagging in front. It is
absolutely true that the etheric body wags.
In the
dog or the elephant all this is utilized to form the spinal
cord. What remains stunted in both these animals is reversed
and pushed forward in man. How is that? In the brain two things
meet: The “wagging organ,” which has been pushed
forward and is present only in man, and the olfactory nerve,
which is also present in man. In the case of the dog, the
olfactory nerve enlarges considerably because nothing
counteracts it; what would restrain it is wagging in the back.
The human being turns this around. The whole “wagging
force” comes forward to the nose, and thus the olfactory
nerve is made as small as possible; as it penetrates into the
brain it is compressed from all sides by what comes to meet it
there. You see, man has within the head an organ that, on the
one hand, forces back his faculty of smell but, on the other,
makes him into a human being. This organ results from the
forces that are pushed up and forward.
In the
case of the dog and the elephant, much of the olfactory nerve
is located in the forward part of the brain; a large olfactory
nerve is present there. In man, this nerve is somewhat stunted.
The nerves that were pushed upward from below spread out
instead. As a result, in this spot where in the dog sensations
of smell spread out much further, in the human being the
noblest part of the brain is located. There, located in the
forward part of the brain, is the sense for compassion,
the sense for understanding other human beings, and that is
something noble. What the dog expends in its tail wagging, man
transforms into something noble. There, in the forward part of
the brain, just at the spot where the lowly nose would
otherwise transmit its olfactory nerve, man possesses an
extraordinarily noble organ.
I have
mentioned that we do not smell equally well with the left and
the right nostrils. Now, try to recall someone who is in the
habit of making pronounced gestures. What does he do when he is
pondering something? I am sure you have seen it. He reaches up
with his finger or his hand and touches his nose; his index
finger comes to rest directly over the septum, the inner wall
dividing the nasal passages. For right here, behind the nose
and within the brain, the capacity for discrimination has
its physical expression.
The
septum of the dog enables it not only to follow a lead
exactingly but also to distinguish carefully with the left and
the right nostrils how the scents appear to either one or the
other. The dog always has in its right nostril the scent of
what it is pursuing at the moment, while in the left it has the
scents of everything it has already pursued. The dog
therefore becomes increasingly skilful in pursuit, just
as we men become more and more intelligent when we learn more
and commit facts to our memory. The dog has a particularly good
memory for scents, and that is why he becomes such a keen
tracker.
A
trace of that still exists in human life. Man's sense of smell
has become dulled, but Mozart, for example, was sometimes
inspired with his best melodies when he smelled a flower in a
garden. When he pondered the reason for this, he realized that
it happened because he had already smelled this flower
somewhere else and that he had especially liked it. Mozart
would never have gone so far as to say, “Well, I was once
in this beautiful garden in such and such a place, and there
was this flower with a wonderful fragrance that pleased me
immensely; now, here is the fragrance again, and it makes me
almost want to, well — wag my tail.” Mozart would
not have said that, but a beautiful melody entered his mind
when he smelled this flower the second time. You can tell from
this how closely linked are the senses of smell and memory.
This
is caused not by what we human beings absorb as scents but
rather by what we push forward in the brain and against it. Our
power of discrimination is developed there. If a person can
think especially logically, if he has the proper thought
relationships, then we can say that he has pushed his brain
forward against his olfactory nerve, that he has actually
adjusted the brain to what otherwise would have also been the
olfactory nerve. We can say, too, that the more
intelligent a man is, the more he has overcome the dog
nature in himself. If a person were born with a dog-like
capability to smell especially well, and he was educated to
learn to distinguish things other than smells, he would
become an unusually clever person because he would be able to
discriminate among these other things by virtue of what he had
pushed up against the olfactory nerve.
Cleverness, the power of discrimination, is basically the
result of man's overcoming his sense of smell. The elephant and
the dog have their intelligence in their noses; in other words,
it is quite outside themselves. Man has this cleverness
inside himself, and that is what distinguishes him. Hence it is
not enough just to check and see whether the human being
possesses the same organs as the animals. Certainly, both
dog and man have a nose, but what matters is how each nose is
organized. You can see from this that something is at
work in man that is not active in the dog, and if you perceive
this you gradually work yourself up from the physical level to
the soul level. In the dog the nose and the bushy end of the
spine, which is only covered by skin permeated with bony
matter, have no inclination to grow toward each other. This
tendency originates only from the soul, which the dog does not
have in the way a man does. So, then, I have described the nose
and everything that belongs to it in such a way that you see
its continuation into the brain and find that man's
intelligence is connected with this organ.
There
is another sense that is quite similar to the sense of smell
but in other respects totally different: the sense of taste. It
is so closely related that the people in the region where I was
born never say “smell”; the word is not used there
at all. They say instead, “It tastes good,” or
“It tastes bad,” when they smell something. Where I
was born they do not talk of smelling but only of tasting.
(Someone in the audience calls out, “Here, too, in
Switzerland!”) Yes, also here in Switzerland you don't
talk of smelling; smelling and tasting appear so closely
related to people that they don't distinguish between the
two.
If we
now investigate the sense of taste, we will find that here
there is something strange. Again, it is somewhat like it was
with the sense of smell. So, if you take the cavity of the
mouth, here in the back is the so-called soft palate, in the
front is the hard palate, and there are the teeth with the
gums. If you examine all this you will find something strange.
Just as a nerve runs down into the nose, so here, too, nerves
run from the brain down into the mouth. But these nerves do not
penetrate into the gums, nor do they extend into the hard
palate in front. They reach only into the soft palate in the
back, and they go only into the back part of the tongue, not
its front part. So if you see how the nerves are distributed
that lead to the sense of taste, you will find only a few in
front, practically none. The tip of the tongue is not really an
organ of taste but rather one of touch. Only the back part of
the tongue and the soft palate can taste. The mouth is soft in
the back and hard in the front; only the soft parts are capable
of tasting. The gums also have no sensation of taste.
The
peculiar thing is that these nerves that convey the sense of
taste in man are also connected primarily with everything
that makes up the intestinal organization. It is indeed true
that first and foremost a food must taste good, although its
chemical composition is also important. In his taste man has a
regulator for the intake of his food. We should study much more
carefully what a small child likes or does not like rather than
examine the chemical ingredients of its food. If the child
always rejects a food, we shall find that something is amiss
with its lower abdominal organs, and then one must intervene
there.
I have
already sketched the “tail wagging ability” that is
reversed in man and that in the dog extends all the way into
the back. If we now move forward from the tail, we reach the
abdomen, the intestines, and to these the taste nerves
correspond. It is like this: When a dog abandons itself
to smelling, it wags its tail, which signifies that it drives
everything through its entire body. The effects of what it
smells pass all the way through to the end, to the very tip end
of the tail. The tip of the nose is the farthest in front, and
the tail is the farthest behind. What is connected with
smelling in the dog passes through the entire length of its
body, but what it tastes does not; it remains in the abdominal
area and does not go as far. We can see from this that the
farther something related with the nerves is located
within the organism, the less far-reaching is its effect in the
body. This will teach us to understand even better than we know
already that the whole form of man depends on his nerves. Man
is formed after his nerves. In the case of the dog, its tail is
formed after the nose. What are its intestines formed after?
They are formed after the nerves of the muzzle. The nerves are
situated on one end, and they bring about the form on the
other end. This is something that you must take as a basis for
further consideration. You will gain much from realizing
that the dog owes its whole tail wagging ability to its nose,
and that when it feels good in the abdominal area, this is due
to the nerves of the mouth. We shall learn more about this
later.
It is
extraordinarily interesting how the nerves are related to form.
This is why I said the other day that even a blind person
benefits from his eyes; even though the eyes are useless for
sight, their nerves still help shape the body. The way a person
appears is caused by the nerves of his head and in part by the
nerves of his eyes, as well as by many other nerves. Therefore,
if we want to understand why the human being differs in form
from the dog, we have to think of the nose! The nose plays an
important part in the shape of a dog, but in the human being it
is overcome and somewhat subdued in its functions. In the dog,
the nose occupies a higher rung on the ladder; it is the
head-master, so to speak. In man, the function of the nose is
forced back. The eye and the ear are certainly more important
for his formation than is the nose.
|