VII
Spiritual-Scientific Foundations for a
True Physiology
Gentlemen, this time let us finish answering a question raised
the other day.
By
virtue of his skin, man is an entire sense organ. The skin of
the human being is something extraordinarily complicated
and truly marvellous. When we trace it from the outside inward,
we find first a transparent and horny layer called the
epidermis. It is transparent only in us white Europeans;
in Africans, Indonesians and Malayans, it is saturated with
coloured granules and thus tinged with colour. It is called
“horny” because it consists of the same substance,
arranged a little differently, from which the horns of animals
and our nails and hair are fashioned. Our nails actually grow
out of the uppermost layer of the skin. Under this layer lies
the dermis, which consists of an upper and a lower layer. So we
are in fact covered and enclothed with a three-layered skin:
the outer epidermis, the middle layer of the dermis and the
lower part of the dermis.
The
lowest layer of the dermis nourishes the whole skin; it stores
the nourishing substances for the skin. The middle layer is
filled with all kinds of things, but in particular it is filled
with muscle fibres. Everywhere in this layer are myriad tiny
onion-like things, one next to the other; we have
thousands upon thousands in our skin. We can call them
“onions” because the distinguishing feature of an
onion is its many peels, and these little corpuscles have such
“onion peels”; the onion skin is on the surface,
and the other, thinner part is on the inside. They were
discovered by the Italian Pacini and are therefore called
“Pacinian corpuscles.”
Around
these microscopic corpuscles are from twenty to sixty such
peels, so you can imagine how small they are.
Man is
constituted in such a way that he has these microscopic
little bulbs over the whole surface of his body. The largest
number is found — in snakes as well as in men — on
the tip of the tongue. Yes, it is almost comical, but most are
found on the tip of the tongue! There are many on the tips of
the fingers, on the palms of the hands and on other parts of
the body, but most are on the tip of the tongue. For
example, there are seven times more such little nerve
bulbs on the tip of the tongue than there are on the finger
tips.
A
nerve fibre originates from each of these corpuscles and finds
its way into the brain via the spinal marrow. All these nerve
fibres radiate from the brain, and everywhere in the body they
form such nerve bulbs on its surface. So these nerve fibres in
the brain go everywhere and eventually form the onions within
the skin or dermis. It is interesting to realize that just as
real onions grow in the ground and form onion blossoms above,
so do these onions grow in the human body. There (pointing to
his sketch) are the onions and the stem within. In those nerves
of the tongue the stem is rather short, but in other nerves it
is sometimes quite long. The nerve fibres going from the feet
into the brain through the spinal marrow are extremely long.
Everything that we have as onions in our skin actually has
blossoms within our skull. You may imagine, then, that in
regard to his skin man is a kind of soil; it is strangely
formed, but it still is a kind of soil. On the surface is the
epidermis, in which various crystal substances are
deposited. Below are the solid masses of the body, and above is
the layer of “humus.” Going from outside
inward, beneath the hard, horny layer of the epidermis lies the
dermis, which is the soil. From it grow all these onions that
have blossoms in the brain. Their stems pass up into the brain
and have blossoms there.
Well,
gentlemen, in us older fellows things are such that only during
sleep can we properly trace this network, but in a child it is
still much in evidence. The child has a lively nerve bulb
activity in the nerves as long as its intellect is unawakened;
that is, throughout its first year, and just as the sun shines
over the blossoms of the onions, so shines the light into the
child that as yet does not translate with the intellect
what it receives with its eyesight. This is indeed like the sun
shedding its rays inside the head and opening up all the onion
blossoms. In the nerves of the skin we carry a whole plant
kingdom around within us. Later, however, when we enter grammar
school this lively growing comes to an end, and then we use the
forces from the nerves for thinking. We draw these forces
out and use them for thinking. This is extremely interesting.
Ordinarily, it is assumed that the nerves do the thinking, but
the nerves do not think. We can employ the nerves for thinking
only by stealing their light, so to speak. The human soul
steals the light from the nerves, and it uses what it has taken
away for thinking. It is really so. When we truly ponder the
matter, we finally recognize at every point the
independently active soul.
We
have such inwardly growing onions in common with all animals.
Even the lowest forms, which have slimy, primitive
shapes, possess sensory nerves that end in a kind of onion on
the surface. The higher we ascend toward man, the more are
certain of these nerve onions transformed in a specific manner.
The nerves of the taste buds, for example, are such transformed
skin nerves.
Now,
we possess these sensory bulbs at the tip of the tongue and
that is why it is so sensitive. We taste on the back of the
tongue and on the soft palate where such little onions are
dispersed. Actually, they sit there in a little groove and
within these grooves an onion penetrates into the nerves and
pushes into the dermis as a nerve corpuscle. First, a tiny
groove forms behind the tongue, and then an onion pushes itself
into this groove. The root of the onion penetrates all the way
to the surface of the tongue. On the base of the tongue are a
tremendous number of tiny grooves, and in each little groove a
“bulb” grows up from below. This accounts for our
experience of taste.
We can
be aware of everything with the sense of touch, or these onions
located on our body's surface. Now, you know that what one
feels one does not remember so well. I know with my feeling
that a chair is hard because I feel its hardness with a certain
number of nerve bulbs that constantly change, but my
memory is not strained by this sensation. With the sense of
taste it makes a little, though unconscious effort. Gourmets,
however, always know beforehand what is good, not afterward
when they have already tasted it, and that is why they order
it.
So the
nerve corpuscles pass through the spinal marrow directly into
the brain and form blossoms there. Everything that we want to
taste, however, must first be dissolved by the saliva in the
mouth; we can taste nothing that hasn't first been transformed
into fluid. But what is it that tastes? We would not be able to
taste anything if we did not have fluid within us. Our solid
human constitution, everything that is solid in the body, does
not taste. Our inner fluid mixes with what is dissolved of the
food. Thus, we can say that our own fluid mixes with the fluid
from without. The solid part of the human organization does not
taste anything. Our constitution is ninety percent water,
and here, around the papillae of the tongue, it is in an
especially fluid state. Just as water shoots out of a geyser,
so do we have such a spurting forth of fluid on the tip of the
tongue.
Saliva
that has been spit out of the mouth is no longer part of me,
but as long as that fluid is within the little gland of the
tongue, it belongs to me as a human being, just as my muscles
belong to me. I consist not only of solid muscles but also of
water, and it is this fluid that actually does the tasting
because it mixes with what comes as fluid from without. What
does one do when one licks sugar? One drives saliva from within
toward the taste buds. The dissolved sugar penetrates the
fluid, and the “fluid man,” as it were,
permeates himself with the sugar. The sugar is secreted
delicately in the taste buds of the tongue and spreads
out in one's own fluidity, giving him a feeling of
well-being.
As
human beings we can only taste, but why is this so? If we had
fins and were fishes — which would be an interesting
existence — every time we ate, the taste would penetrate
right through our fins. But then we would have to swim in
water, where we would find everything even the delicate
substances well-dissolved. The fish tastes all the traces of
substances that are in the water and follows the direction of
its taste, which is constantly penetrating into the fins. If
something pleasant flows in its direction, the fish will taste
it, and its fins will immediately move toward it. We men cannot
do what the fish can because we have no fins; in us they are
completely lacking. But since we cannot use the sensation of
taste to move around, we intensify it within. Fishes have a
highly developed sense of taste, but they have no inward sense
of it. We human beings have the taste within, we
experience it; fishes exist in the totality of the water
and experience taste together with the surrounding water.
People have wondered why a fish swims far out into the ocean
when it wants to lay its eggs. They swim far out, not only into
the Atlantic Ocean, but also into other parts of the earth's
oceans, and then the young slowly return to European waters.
Why is this? Well, European fishes that swim around in our
rivers are fresh-water fishes, but the eggs cannot mature in
fresh water. Fishes sense by taste that a trace of salt flows
toward the outlet of a river; they then swim out into the sea.
If the sun shines differently on the other side of the earth,
they taste that and by this sense swim halfway around the
globe. Then the young taste their way back again to where the
parent fishes have dwelt. So we see that fishes follow their
taste in every way.
It is
extremely interesting that the water that flows in the rivers
and is contained in the seas is full of taste, and the fact
that fishes swim around in them is really due to the water's
taste. It is actually the taste of the water that makes them
swim around; the taste of the water gives them their
directions. Naturally, if the sun shines on a certain
portion of water, everything that is in the water at that spot
is thoroughly dissolved by the heat of the sun. It is
changed into another taste, and that is why you see a lot of
fishes swimming around there; it is the taste.
It is
really a strange matter, gentlemen, because we would actually
be swimming, too, if we went only by our taste. When I taste
sugar the fluid man within me wants to swim toward it. The urge
to swim is indeed there; we want to swim constantly according
to our taste, but the solid body prevents us from doing so.
From that element that continually would like to swim but
cannot — we really have something like a fish within us
that constantly wants to swim but is held back — we
retain what our inner soul being makes out concerning
taste. With taste we live completely within the etheric body,
but the etheric body is held fast by the water in us, and that
water in turn is held by our physical body. It is the most
natural thing to say that man has an etheric body that is
really not disposed to walking on the earth. It is suited
only for swimming; it is in fact fish-like, but because man
makes it stand erect it becomes something different. Man has
within him this etheric body that is actually only in his fluid
organization, and it is indeed so that he would
constantly like to swim, swim in the elements of water that are
contained even in the air. We would like to be always swimming
there, but we transform this urge into the inner experience of
taste.
You
see, such aspects really lead one to comprehend the human
being. You cannot find this in any modern scientific book
because people examine not the living human being but only the
corpse, which no longer wants to swim. Nor does it participate
any longer in life. We participate in life because actually we
are the sum of everything existing in the world. We are fishes,
and the water vapor that is similar to us is something in which
we would like to be constantly swimming about. The fact that we
cannot do so results in our pouring it into us and tasting it.
The fishes are really cold creatures. They could taste things
marvellously well that are dissolved in the water, but they do
not do so because they immediately move their fins. If the fins
would disappear from the fishes, they would become higher
animals and would begin to have sensations of taste.
The
nerve bulbs that I told you about last time are
differently transformed “onions.” They
penetrate into the mucous membrane of the nose, but they do not
sit within a groove from which fluid seeps out; they reach all
the way to the surface. That is why these nerve bulbs can
perceive only what comes close to them. This means that we have
to let the fragrance of the rose come up to the nerve
bulb of our nose before we can smell it. Thus, one part of the
human body has the function of fashioning in a special way
these nerve bulbs, which are spread out over the whole skin, in
order to sense smells permeating the air.
Not
only does the outer air waft toward man, but also the breath
streams out from within him. The breath constantly passes
through the nose, and within this breath lives the air being of
man. We are water, and as I told you earlier, we are also air.
We do not have the air within us just for the fun of it. Like
the water within me, my breath is not solid. Just as when I
reach out my hand and feel that I have stretched out something
solid, so I stretch what I contain in my air organism
into my nose. There I grasp the fragrance of the rose or
carnation. Indeed, I am not only a solid being but
continually a being of water and air as well. We are the
air as long as it is within us and is alive. When we stretch
our “air hands” through the nose and grasp the
fragrance of a rose or carnation — bad odors, too,
of course — we do not touch it with our hand but rather
grasp it with the nerve bulbs, which attract the breath from
within so that it can take hold of the fragrance.
This
is something that is manifest also in the dog. I have told you
that as soon as the nose smells, the tail wags. Just as with
fishes the fins start to move about, so, too, with dogs the
tail starts to move. But what does this tail that can only wag
really want to do? This is most interesting. The tail can only
wag, but what does it really want to do? You see, gentlemen,
the dog would really like to do something quite different. If
it were not a dog but a bird it would fly under the influence
of smell. Just as fishes swim, a dog would fly if it were a
bird. Well, of course, a dog has no wings, and so he uses the
substituted organ and just wags his tail. It isn't enough
for flying, but it involves the same expenditure of
energy. In human beings it is the same. Because we always have
delicate sensations of smell that we do not even notice,
we would constantly like to fly.
Think
now of the swallows that live here in summer. What arises as
scents from the flowers is pleasing to them, and because it is
pleasing to their organ of smell they remain here. But when
autumn comes or is just approaching, the swallows, if they
could communicate among themselves, would say, “Oh, it's
beginning to smell bad!” The swallow has an
extraordinarily delicate sense of smell. You remember
that I told you that people are perceptible to savage tribes
all the way to Arlesheim. Well, for swallows the odour arising
in the south is perceptible when fall is approaching; it
actually spreads out all the way to the north. While in the
south it smells good, up north it begins to smell of decay. The
swallows are attracted to the good odour and fly south.
Whole
libraries have been written about the flight of birds, but the
truth is that even during the great migrations in spring and
autumn the birds follow the extremely delicate dispersion of
odours in the whole atmosphere of the earth. The organ of smell
in the swallows guides them to the south and then back again to
the north. When spring arrives here in our lands, it starts to
smell bad for the swallows down south. When the delicate
fragrances of spring flow southward to them, they fly
back north. It is really true that the whole earth is one
living being and that the other beings belong to it.
In our
body, things are so organized that the blood flows to the head
and then away from it. On the earth, things are so arranged
that the migratory birds fly to the equator and then back to
their point of departure. We, too, are influenced by the air
because the air we breathe drives the blood to the head.
Insofar as we are beings of air, we are completely
permeated with smell. For example, a person who walks
across a field that has just been fertilized with manure is
really going there together with his airy being. The
solid man and the fluid man do not notice the manure, but the
man of air does, and then there arises in him, understandably
enough, the urge to fly away. When the manure's stinking odour
rises from the field, he would actually like to fly off into
the air. He cannot do so because he lacks the wings and thus
reacts inwardly to what he cannot fly away from; it becomes an
internal process of the soul. As a result, man inwardly
becomes permeated with the manure odour, with the evaporations
that have become gaseous and vapor-like. He becomes suffused
with the bad odour and says that he loathes it. His loathing is
a reaction of the soul.
In the
fluid man there exists the more delicate airy form that, in a
way, he takes from the fluid organization of himself. It
is through this that he can taste. Likewise, something lives in
this airy form that we constantly renew in us through inhaling
and exhaling. Each moment it is expelled and reborn; it is born
eighteen times a minute and dies eighteen times a minute. It
takes years for the solid form to die, but the airy form dies
during exhalation eighteen times a minute and is born during
inhalation. It is a continuous process of dying and being born.
What is extracted within is the astral body. As I told you the
other day, it is the astral body that reverses the forces of
tail-wagging that should really be down below. Because these
forces are pushed up and against the sense of smell, we are
able to think. The brain grows to meet the nose under the
influence of the astral body, and no one can really understand
the brain who does not look at the whole matter in the way I
have just done. This understanding results from a correct
observation of our senses.
On
account of our sense of smell we would always like to be
flying. The bird can fly but we cannot; at best we have these
solid shoulder blades. Why can the bird fly? Gentlemen,
the bird has something peculiar that enables it to fly; it has
hollow bones. Air is inside them and the air that the bird
absorbs through its organ of smell comes into contact with the
air that it has in its bones. Indeed, the bird is primarily a
being of air. Its most important aspect consists of air; the
rest is merely grown on to it. The many feathers a bird may
have are actually all dried up. The most significant thing,
even in the ostrich, is that a bit of air is still contained in
each downy feather and all this air is connected with the air
outside. The ostrich walks because it is too heavy to fly
but, of course, the other birds do.
We
human beings have only our shoulder blades attached to our
back, which are clumsy and solidly shaped. Although we would
constantly like to fly with them, we cannot. Instead, we push
the whole spinal marrow into the brain and begin to think.
Birds do not think. We have only to observe them properly to
realize that everything goes into their flight. It looks
clever, but it is really the result of what is in the air.
Birds do not think, but we do because we cannot fly. Our
thoughts are actually the transformed forces of flying. It is
interesting that in human beings the sense of taste changes
into forces of feeling. When I say, “I feel well,”
I would really like to swim. Since I cannot, this impulse
changes into an inner feeling of well-being. When I say,
“The odour of the manure repulses me,” I would
really like to fly away. But I cannot, and so I have the
thought, “This is disgusting; this odour is
repulsive!” All our thoughts are transformed smells. Man
is such an accomplished thinker because he experiences in the
brain, with that part I described earlier, everything that the
dog experiences in the nose.
As
human beings, we owe a lot to our nose. You see, people who
have no sense of smell, whose mucous membrane is stunted, also
lack a certain sense of creativity. They can think only through
what they have inherited from their parents. It is always good
that we inherit at least something; otherwise, if all our
senses were not rudimentarily developed, we could not live at
all. A person born blind also has inherited the interior
of what the eye possesses. He has this primarily because he is
not only a compact man but also a man of fluid and air.
We
have now seen how strange all this is. We perceive solid
substances with our sense of touch through the nerve bulbs that
penetrate the skin everywhere; we become aware of watery
substances with our sense of taste; what is of air, the
vaporous, is recognized by us through the nerve bulbs that
penetrate into the mucous membrane of the nose. We also sense
something else around us, though in a more general way; that
is, heat and cold. So, as human beings we are partly solid,
water, air, and warmth, since we are usually warmer than
the surrounding world.
You
see, science does not really know that the aspect of tasting
concerns the man of water and that the element of smell
pertains to the man of air. Because the nerves of taste come
into the taste buds, it is the scientific opinion that these
nerves actually taste. But this is nonsense. In the mouth, it
is the fluid of the watery organization of man that tastes, and
in the nose, it is the element of air that smells. Furthermore,
the part of us that is warmth perceives heat and cold. The
internal warmth in us directly perceives the external
warmth, and this is the difference between the sense of warmth
and all the other senses. Warmth is produced by all the organs,
and as human beings we harbour a world of warmth within us.
This element of warmth perceives the other world of warmth
around us. When we touch something that is hot or cold, we
naturally perceive it just on the spot where we have touched
it. But when it is cold in winter or hot in summer, we perceive
this coldness or heat in our surroundings; we become a complete
sense organ.
We can
see how science errs in this regard. According to scientific
books, the human being is some kind of compactly shaped form.
All the bones are drawn on the paper; the muscles and nerves
are all there. But this is utter nonsense because it represents
no more than one tenth of the human being. The rest is up to
ninety percent water, and then we must account for the air and
the warmth within. In fact, three more persons — of
water, air and warmth — should be sketched into the
figures drawn up by materialistic science. Man cannot be
comprehended in any other way. Only because we are warmer than
our surroundings and are also a portion of a world of warmth do
we experience ourselves as being independent in the
world. If we were as cold as a fish or a turtle, we would
have no ego; we could not speak of ourselves as
“I.” We could never think if we had not transformed
the sense of smell within us, or, in other words, if we had no
astral body. Likewise, we would have no ego if we did not
possess a portion of warmth within us.
Now,
someone might say that the higher animals have their own body
temperature, too. Yes, gentlemen, but they are burdened by
their warmth. The higher animals would like to become an
“I” but cannot. Just as we cannot swim or fly, the
higher animals would like to become an “I” but
cannot do it. You can discern that in their forms; they
would really like to become an “I,” and because
they cannot they assume their various shapes.
So, as
human beings we have four parts in us: the solid man, which is
the physical, material part; the fluid man, which carries the
more delicate body — the life body or etheric body
— within itself; the air being, the man of air who
constantly dies and is renewed in the physical realm but
who contains the astral body, which remains throughout life;
the portion of warmth, the ego man.
The
sense of warmth is distributed delicately over the whole human
being. Here science does something peculiar.
When
we examine the human being from a purely materialistic
standpoint, we discover these nerve bulbs that I have described
to you. Now, people say to themselves, “If I touch this
box, I feel it and its solidness because of the nerve bulbs. If
the box were cold, I would also feel the cold through such a
nerve bulb.” They constantly look for these nerve bulbs
of warmth and these nerve bulbs of feeling, but they never find
them. Someone will examine a piece of skin, and because some of
these nerve bulbs for feeling look a little different he thinks
that they belong to something else. But it is all
nonsense. There are no nerve bulbs sensitive to warmth
because the whole human being is perceptive to warmth. These
nerve bulbs are used only for sensing solid, water and
vaporous substances. Where the sense of warmth begins, we
become extremely “light-sensed” beings, that is, no
more than a bit of warmth that perceives exterior heat. When we
are surrounded by an amount of heat that enables us
properly to say “I” to ourselves, we feel
well, but when we are surrounded by freezing cold that
takes away from us the amount of warmth that we are, we are in
danger of losing our ego. The fear in our ego makes the cold
outside perceptible to us. When somebody is freezing he
is actually always afraid for his ego, and with good reason,
because he pushes the ego out of himself faster than he
actually should.
These
are the aspects that will gradually lead us from the
observation of the physical to the observation of the
nonphysical, the non-material. Only in this way can we
begin to comprehend man. Having mentioned all this, we shall be
able to continue with quite interesting observations next
time.
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