From Mammoths to Mediums
GA 350
III. Blood circulation and movement of the heart. Perceiving things of the spirit through the lens in the eye
6 June 1923, Dornach
Good morning, gentlemen.
Does anyone have a question?
A question is asked regarding grey cataract. The individual says he was in hospital in Basel in 1916 with an inflammation of the iris, and he had been given injections in the head. He now wanted to know if these injections might not have done harm.
Rudolf Steiner: Why, did you notice something? You must not think, of course, that those injections could play a role in developing grey cataract. The spots before your eyes you mention need not indicate any form of cataract; they are due to something else. Now you see, injections have the peculiarity that they sometimes make the muscles in the area a bit weaker, and one can then no longer bring the muscles freely into play; the eye becomes a little bit rigid. If you then direct your eye to something it will not focus properly right away, and that causes these 'flies and midges'. But this is often only due, I'd say, to a minor weakness of accommodation. Why did you have those iris injections? They thought it was the vitreous body.
Rudolf Steiner: The thing is, it is always better to fight such things by other means, that is, for as long as possible with medicines taken by mouth. Some things cannot be treated with medicines taken by mouth; then one tries inoculation. But you need not feel concern over this. There's no need for that.
Is there perhaps some other question to be asked, so that we may answer it?
Questioner: I'd like to go back once more to the business of going round and round. I have noticed, and so have my colleagues, that some things are not clear when we are discussing the heart. I have been thinking about the way Dr Steiner once did a drawing for us of how the earth is connected with the moon and there is that aura - I'm not sure I'm getting this right—around the sun. The heart is on the left side of the body. Now I wanted to ask if the heart is also connected with all the things that go on in the world at large.
Rudolf Steiner: Here we need to remember a number of things we have been discussing before. I once said that the ideas people have about the heart in modern science are wrong. They imagine the heart to be a kind of pump, and that the heart pumps the blood through all parts of the body. They see it like this. The heart contracts. When the heart contracts it gets smaller, has less blood in it. It therefore pushes the blood out through the arteries, the blood gets pushed into the body, and being elastic—that is what people think—the heart then expands again. The heart is therefore said to act as a pump today, pumping blood through the body.
You see, that is quite the wrong idea. It is altogether an idea which only comes from the age of materialism, reducing everything to mechanics, therefore, with people thinking the heart is a proper mechanical pumping station which pumps the blood through the whole body. No account is taken of the way in which the whole of life really goes in a living creature. Let me draw your attention to one thing here.
There is a very small lower animal which is really just a kind of tube. If I were to draw it [Fig. 6], it would be something like this. There you'd have a skin. The creature is such a tube. Inside it is hollow, and there it is simply like a small bowl, a small dish. There it has little trapping hairs, and hairs it can move around with. It lives in water, this creature. It is called a hydra, because it lives in water. This creature, the hydra, has the peculiarity that compared to higher animals or human beings it is really nothing but a stomach. And this tube really does nothing but take in all kinds of little granules, all kinds of foods that come near it, and digest them in there. The creature lives in the water, as I said; and all kinds of food float around in the water. The creature swims about, swims up to the bits of food, takes them in and so does just what our stomach does, for that, too, takes things in. The creature does not of course have a gullet, a mouth, for preparing the foods. The hydra simply takes in the foods and digests them. Now the odd thing is that its mouth is also its organ of elimination, its anus. It also eliminates things through the mouth. So you have everything together in this creature.
Now of course to be a form of life, and especially an animal, it must not only eat—eating is something it has to do—but also breathe. And this creature breathes with the outer side of its skin. Everywhere there you have tiny little holes. You always have such little holes where there is organic matter, living matter. And it absorbs the air it needs from the water through these little holes. So we can say this tiny creature, the hydra, has an inner side, a hollow space, which it uses to eat. On the outside it has its breathing organs. The creature draws in air, and the air also gets in there, into the hollow space in the middle. The creature is able to feed, to breathe. Those are its main occupations. It floats about everywhere in the water, eating and breathing in air, which is of course also present in the water.
Now what would a materialistic person say? He would say: 'Ah well, this creature simply consists of this skin. This skin has grown in such a way that it is a feeding apparatus inside and a breathing apparatus on the outside.' That's what a materialist would say. But we cannot say that, for we have to consider this to be a highly superficial way of looking at it. We have to say: 'No, this creature also has an ether body, and it is inside this, and it also has an astral body, being inside that as well. These it has as well, these are its invisible parts.'
Well now, gentleman, is there some way in which we can prove that the creature has something invisible to it as well as the visible part? A materialist will say: 'The visible is of interest to me, the invisible is not. The visible creature shows me a kind of stomach inside, and a kind of lung on the outside. And I am content with that.'
Now there is something you can do with this creature. You know, gentlemen, people like us don't wear gloves, but we know what that looks like. If you have a glove you can turn it inside out. So imagine the glove is brown on the outside, let us say, and has a grey lining inside. If you turn it inside out so that the grey part is on the outside and the brown part inside, you have turned it round completely; now the inside is outside and the outside inside. You could cut off a finger and do the same thing with just a finger of the glove. And if you cut off a finger of the glove and turn it inside out, you get something like this hydra. The hydra looks like the finger of a glove. And the odd thing is that just as you can turn the finger of the glove inside out so that the inside is outside and the outside inside, so you can also turn the hydra inside out. The part I have made red in the drawing will then be on the outside, and the part I have made violet on the inside. But the hollow space is now also on the outside, and whatever was outside before is now inside. And the strange thing is that the hydra suddenly starts to swim about again. It is not at all bothered. It will swim about in the water again, feeding and breathing. It will now take little grains into the hollow space inside, which has been newly created, just as before, and it will now breathe with what was the lining of its stomach before. So the hydra does not mind at all. It takes no harm at all. It begins to feed with the part it had used to breathe before, and to breathe with the part it used to feed before [Fig. 7].
Well, gentlemen, if the situation was that it had grown just so that you had the stomach inside there and the breathing organs on the outside, all the hydra could do in that case would be to breathe in there and start to feed on the outside. But it does not do this. The moment it is turned inside out it makes its stomach into a lung and its lung into a stomach. I'd like to know how that could be done if you had nothing there but a stomach and a lung! If you have a tool, a glove or whatever, you can turn it inside out if it is something physical. If it is something inner you'll of course not be able simply to turn it inside out. The part of it which is ether body and astral body, therefore, the invisible part, still remains. And it is because that part is there that the hydra can simply be turned inside out. So you see that if one just takes a clear look at the things that happen in the natural world, you will immediately find that the materialistic view simply has to be wrong. We are therefore able to say that the actual feeding and breathing is done by something which is invisible. And because the body of a hydra is not made as firm as ours, does not have bones and muscles but is all one kind of material, the hydra is in fact able to use this material for everything.
You see, don't you, that we cannot turn our stomach outside in simply because it is made in a particular way, because we do not consist of the same material all the way through the way the hydra does but of different materials. But our stomach must also breathe inside, and the air we have in it is also taken in from outside. Our stomach is therefore also a kind of hydra.
We can see from all these things, and much more could be added, that it is possible to show in even the smallest of creatures that there is something invisible on which this creature is based.
Well now, gentlemen, you can see from this that even if we talk about the principle which really moves the whole human being, we find that it is something invisible. If you take the external movement of walking, you'll not at all think it is your big toe which takes a step. Instead you say to yourself: 'I am walking; it is my will which make me walk.' When the organs inside us are moving - and that is not only the heart, our intestines are also moving all the time, for instance—when the organs inside us are moving, therefore, these movements are not brought about by the physical matter in us; they are brought about by the part in us that is invisible. We therefore have to say: 'The heart is not a pump, for the heart is moved by our astral body.' So we have an astral body and this moves the heart, or rather, seeing that our I is actually also in the astral body, we also move our heart with our I, and we do so in a quite specific way.
If you look at the heart, it is a bit to the left in a normal person, as Mr Burle said, quite rightly. Not as much as people generally think, but it is a bit to the left. And then these large vessels come from the heart [drawing on the board]. The aorta and the other blood vessels really come from the heart.
Now it is like this. When I breathe in, for example, I feed myself oxygen, as it were. When I breathe out, I give out carbon dioxide. As soon as I have given out the carbon dioxide I hunger for oxygen. I want to breathe in again. In the first place, this has nothing at all to do with my heart but with my whole body. My whole body hungers for oxygen. Because it develops this hunger for oxygen, the instinct arises to get all the blood moving, for the blood has to have oxygen. Using its astral body, the physical body sends the blood to a place where it can get oxygen.
Or let us assume I walk, or I work. The food in me is burned up then. I have discussed this with you before. The blood then has few nutrients left. If you work, the blood always loses most of its nutrients. And what does the blood want now? It wants more food again. The blood grabs the food for itself, as it were, which the stomach and intestines have taken up. All this, the hunger for air, the hunger for food, sets the blood in motion. It is the blood which moves in the first place, and the blood takes the heart along with it. And so it is not the heart which pumps the blood through the body, but the blood moves because of its hunger for air, hunger for food, and this moves the heart. We therefore have to say that it is the invisible human being in us which moves the heart.
Well, gentlemen, hearing this you may well raise a question. You see, the situation with our anthroposophy is always such that our opponents believe that they are raising the objections. But we've already known the objections long before that. You raise them yourself in the first place. This is why I am also always drawing your attention to the objections. You may object: 'Yes, but why do we have a heart if it does not pump the blood through the body? If the blood moves by itself, maybe we don't even need a heart that needs to be taken along in the movement.'
Now you see, that is the kind of thing people will say who have no real idea of the whole human body. There is a big difference between the human head and the rest of the human being. I have spoken of this difference before. Just think you are walking or working. Well, the head does not join in the effort. The head sits on the rest of the body, more or less the way we would sit in a carriage. You sit there without moving. The carriage has to move its wheels, the horses must pull it along. But it is our hands and our feet that have to work like this, and the head sits in there and does not join in the effort, you see? Otherwise we'd need ropes or something on our ears and we'd have to set the wheels of the machines in motion with these. We don't do that. The head does not join in the effort. Just imagine one might fix such ropes to one's head of hair—most people can no longer do this today, having gone bald. Doing this will not do people any good. The head does not really share in the effort; it sits calmly on top of the rest of the organism. The question is, why does it do this? Well, you see, the head is something completely different from the rest of us. The rest of us is a movement apparatus. The head is only a movement apparatus in so far as it goes along with the movements, and so on; the movements thus act up into the head. But the head is not the part of us which moves of its own accord.
The head has sense organs on its outside. There it perceives what exists outside. But the head also perceives what goes on inside, though unconsciously so in most people. If I want to look outside, so that I'll know what goes on out there, I use my eyes. If I want to look inside, at the blood circulation, I use my heart. The heart does not exist to pump blood through the body; it is a sense organ which perceives everything, just as the whole of the head does. We would not be able to know anything about our blood circulation—of course, we know nothing about it directly in our brainbox, but there has to be a knowing in the head—if the head did not perceive the whole of our blood circulation through the heart.
I have told you that the liver is an organ with sensory functions. It perceives the lower movements, for example. But the movements of the whole human being are perceived by the heart. It is this which sets the heart in motion. The movements caused by the hunger for air and the hunger for food set the heart in motion. And the movements of the heart show you if something is out of order in the body or if it is in order.
You can easily see this, gentlemen. For what do we do when someone gets sick? The first thing to do is to check the pulse. Someone who has developed the habit of checking the pulse can tell an enormous amount from the pulse beat. The pulse beat truly is a barometer for the whole state of health and sickness. The pulse beat is nothing but the movement of the blood, however. The head is all the time doing what we do when we feel the pulse of a sick person. It is continually sensing the whole blood circulation and it does so through the heart. And indeed, the head senses everything that goes on in the body, doing so through the heart.
Imagine someone has drunk a lot of alcohol one night, getting thoroughly drunk, as we say. This will upset the whole of his blood circulation. The next day the head will know, from the heart: the whole blood circulation is upset. It develops a hangover, the well-known thick head. But why does the head feel like that? You see, if I go for a walk on a beautiful day, using my eyes, I am impressed by the beauty. If the weather out there is terrible, I get a bad impression. Yes, gentlemen, if everything moves the way it should in the blood, the head gets a good impression, and all is in its proper order in the head. But if there's a thunderstorm in the blood—which is the situation when someone got drunk the night before—the head gets a thunderous impression through the heart, with everything going topsy-turvy. We can therefore only understand what the heart really is if we know that it is in fact the inner sense organ through which the head perceives everything that is going on in the body.
When we look about us in the world we find that man is related to the whole world through his invisible part, the part I have called his astral body. Sun and moon are the most important stars to which we relate. Now the situation is that the head relates mainly to the sun and the rest of the human being actually relates to the moon. And we can say that it is of course a terrible superstition when people think they can do something with today's moon phases. But there is a rhythm in the human being that is also reflected in the blood. This is similar to the moon rhythm. Man does indeed take his orientation from the whole world. And so it is also the case that the internal movement of the blood does not only depend on the food we eat. When someone is in good health—in a way he is an independent creature—he makes himself in a sense independent of the influences of outer nature, and in a sense also makes himself independent of the whole world. But the moment a person begins to be a little bit sick, he becomes dependent on the whole world.
Let us assume someone is sick and you notice this when you check his pulse. Someone able to read the pulse will find an enormous difference in the pulse between morning and evening. Much can be learned from the difference between the morning and evening pulses. With some sick people there is also a big difference between the pulse at full moon and the pulse at new moon. The individual is dependent. He may be able to make himself independent when in health, but some dependence remains, and this shows itself particularly in the case of sickness. We thus have to say that with regard to the influences on the heart we certainly have a relationship to the movements of cosmic bodies, especially the moon. We relate to the movements of the moon. This is something where many, many observations still need to be made.
As I said earlier, the heart is a little to the left in a normal human being. But just as there are left-handed people though most people are right-handed, so, oddly enough, there are also people with the heart on the right. There are people whose hearts are on the right and not the left side. This is not noticed, as a rule, for the difference is an internal one, of course. You soon notice it if someone is left-handed, but you'll not notice so easily if his heart is a little to the right rather than the left. It would, however, be interesting to follow up people who have their heart on the right side and see if they are a bit different in life from people whose hearts are on the left. People whose heart is on the right, that is, placed more to the right, are people who must always do certain things they do at a particular time of the year or of the day. A right-hearted person is much more dependent on the environment than a left-hearted person. And if the heart is just a little bit to the right—after all, it's not in the same place in every person but a little bit different in each individual—if it is still to the left but just a little bit to the right, he'll have a longing to take his orientation more from the outer environment. He'll want to do something special in spring, let us say, and something special in autumn. He won't always be able to do that, of course, and this will then have a bad effect on him. People have no idea of the things that can have a bad effect on them.
If children have their hearts a bit to the right, one needs to do things slightly differently for them at school—this need not be at all noticeable—than for children who have their hearts in the right place. Someone whose heart is more to the right is led to make many more demands on his astral body.
You see, gentlemen, that's how it is. If someone operates a machine for a long time you'll realize that as a general rule his work will become mechanical. It gets more unpleasant because one is oneself becoming a piece of machinery, and if you operate a machine for a long time your actions and so on become mechanical. Now imagine you're a completely normal person with the heart properly to the left. Your father also had his heart to the left, and your grandfather and your great grandfather. So there's been a gradual development, and when you are born as the son, you will of course make the same movement inwardly that your father and grandfather and great grandfather have made. That happens as easily as if one had been operating a machine for a long time.
Someone whose heart is to the right has not inherited the position of his heart from his father. The father will not generally be a right-hearted person. It is not a hereditary trait. In this case one has to do everything afresh again, as it were, out of the astral body. You do not then have all the heredity in you. And the result is that such a person, who is a right-hearted person, needs to use much more inner strength to have his blood circulation in proper order. And it is because of this that such a right-hearted person takes his orientation much more from the outside.
The following may actually happen. Let us assume that you are not at all right-hearted, but quite normally left-hearted. But if you become a ballet dancer—this is something that also happens to men, but even more so to women—the dancing will also affect the heart. At present ballet is very materialistic. But in earlier times, when people were asked to dance, in ancient Greece, for example, they would follow movements that imitated those of the stars and this would actually move the heart a little bit to the right, in their lifetime. Dancing, even though it has grown materialistic today, does have a powerful effect on the heart, for it does move it a little to the right. And if people were to pay more attention to such things they would certainly see, if they dissect the body after death, that certain vessels in the heart are enlarged. Because the individual concerned was a dancer, the heart—and one can see this even after death—has moved a little to the right.
This answers the question Mr Burle has asked. It is answered because we see that someone who is given more to his astral body, does not want to follow his normal blood circulation but wants to control it more. He therefore gives himself up to movements that are more like those that occur beyond the earth, like those of the moon. Can you understand this? [Answer: Yes.]
So the matter you asked about today, that one easily notices that people have a certain longing to do this, has to do with the fact that human beings control the whole movement of the heart from their invisible part, and that they then, I'd say, slip over a little in the direction of the invisible, and then really take their orientation from the outside world and not only the internal movement of the blood which takes its orientation from the breathing and the blood. All these things can be explained if one really understands the human being.
I'd now like to talk about something that still has a little bit to do with what we discussed the last time. The last time we met we saw that there is this small lens in the eye [drawing on the board]. When someone has normal vision, this small lens is transparent. When someone develops cataract the lens grows opaque. Salts are deposited in it. We are thus able to say that in a healthy person, we have the lens here—if this is the front part of the eye. It is transparent. In someone with cataract, the lens is opaque, with salts deposited in it. If the lens is transparent, the human astral body is able to see the world with that transparent lens. He'll see everything in the world.
If the things I have written about in my little book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds get one in the habit of very, very intensive thinking, a moment will come when one is able to do something quite special. But people are not easily prepared to get in the habit of very intensive thinking today. They'll not do such a thing as withdrawing completely into their thinking, for they say everything should be given to them from outside; the secrets of the world must be investigated from the outside. Of course, it is not at all easy, for one has to pay very careful attention with this thinking. If one is very much alive in one's thinking, one must of course be terribly careful. But a moment will come in life where one is able to do something quite special. You see, anyone will understand it if I use my hand to lift up a chair, for it is something that is done all the time. But I can also keep my hand still and not use it to do the things it usually does. The work done by the lens in one's eye is not in our power like that. When an impression comes from outside, well, you simply look in the direction of it through your lens. When there's no impression coming in, the lens is at rest.
But just think, gentlemen, that someone has really worked very hard to make his thinking very strong. He then lives wholly within his inner thinking. He does not look at the outside world, keeping his lens still just as we keep a hand still when not using it to do something. What happens then is that the whole of the starry heavens is reflected in the place where one otherwise has the transparent lens that enables one to see. This is the truly wonderful thing, I'd say, that if one uses the method I have given in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds one learns to use one's individual organs not for the earth but indeed for the other world. Now if salts have become deposited, of course, the lens develops cataract and becomes non-transparent whether you want it or not. When someone thinks very deeply, it will stay transparent, of course, but the person is not looking through the lens, he is not looking at the outside world. And then it begins to illumine the whole world from the lens. But it is the spiritual element one then sees, the whole of the starry heavens in their true inner significance. This small area in the human being where the lens is located can teach us about all the things one then takes heart to say about the stars and so on. You see, that is how magnificent things are with the human being, that tremendous insights are gained in the smallest place.
Someone who has cataract—we won't wish it on anyone, of course—actually has it easier with the whole of this, he need not make quite such an effort with his thinking. He only needs to concentrate just a little and he can reach the point where he sees inwardly, having lost the ability to see in an outer way. But this is something we always need to emphasize when speaking of such higher insights. However, speaking of such higher insights, it is obvious that one may also make too much of an effort and then something like a disorder of the lens may develop instead of higher insight. With this powerful inner concentration the lens may grow a bit less transparent, even if one does not get cataract. Because of this everything in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds is written in such a way that a person can achieve the things that are described but will not get sick in doing so. No exercise should be described in such a way that people may also get sick from it. But the lens is the place in the human being where the whole spirit world can indeed be revealed in the inner eye. And we may therefore say that we can see in an outer way if everything is transparent in the eye. We can see in an inner way if something is deliberately made opaque.
Yes, gentlemen, this is something which will show you how insight into worlds of spirit comes about. Insight into worlds of spirit arises if one first of all finds the individual points in the head, points which are then not used for ordinary activities by keeping them at rest. The lens will in the first place give us insight into the outside world. But one can get the whole body to a point where all kinds of things inside are not needed for the moment. If one does not use the heart, for instance—the circulation may continue, but you do not use the heart as a sense organ—you actually begin to perceive the whole of your blood circulation. But you'll not only perceive the blood circulation in that case. If you make your heart such that you look at your blood circulation through your body, as it were, and do not have inner sensation of the heart, nor of your pulse beat, but look through them, as you look out into the world through your lens with your head, that is, if you learn to see through yourselves—then, gentlemen you will see not just the blood circulation but you'll see the whole movement of the moon, everything the moon does, and you'll see how the moon relates to the sun. And you will then see the relationship which the heart has to sun and moon.
You see, in earlier times people had it easier with all this. They had not been taught at school to gain all their knowledge from the outside world only. They simply did not want to see only the things in front of them. If you had taken a Greek who may have lived 2,700 or 2,800 years ago to a cinema he would not have looked at the film for long, for he would have fainted. The moment the ancient Greek would have looked at the film, something would have happened in him—not just in a limb but in the whole human being—which happens to you if a limb goes to sleep because there is some pressure on it. He would not have had a real sleep, but this going to sleep of the whole person would have happened if you had made an ancient Greek sit down and watch a film. He would of course have fainted. The ancient Greek could not have looked at this at all because his head would have suffered such disorder through the heart in his whole blood system that his whole body, not just individual limbs, would have gone to sleep and the head would not have had anything under control. He would have fainted. People are very different now from the way they were in the past. Today people's blood circulation is already so disordered because of our modern civilization that they'll not faint at the pictures.
When one has really inwardly worked a bit with the science of the spirit and goes to a cinema, one has to make quite an effort, or one may pass out even today. But of course we're all human beings, and the one takes up the characteristics of the other. And the situation is that people no longer have the blood circulation system they had in earlier times, like the people of old. Those people of old therefore found it easier to see through to the blood circulation system and to speak of sun and moon than we do. We are cut off from that and have to get back to it first by doing exercises. We must first really make our organs such again that we'll be able to see.
You see, the ancient Greek would still have been able to understand the things earlier people told him about what really happens on earth. You should not think that everything that has come down from antiquity is superstition, it is only that later people often changed it so much that it has turned into superstition. It is really strange how things that were quite sensible to begin with later on simply become superstition. If one no longer knows how things actually should be presented, they will of course become superstition. The ancient Jews would not eat pork, for example. Yes, they knew that, being of that particular race and living in the area they did, pork would make them weak. Later this became a superstition. Things that later on are superstition will always come from things that originally were quite sensible. So we must not think that all the knowledge of ancient times is always nonsense, but you can't always rely on the old things because they have often been falsified later on. We must therefore investigate everything afresh again.
It is nonsensical therefore for people to say that anthroposophy is a collection of things that have been known before. Nothing is taken up as it is; everything is investigated again. And when someone says to you, gentlemen: 'In anthroposophy they're just putting together all kinds of ancient teachings of the Gnostics,' ask him if he can show you where the business of the lens may be found that I have told you about this time and the last time, if this can be found in a book anywhere. It can't, of course, for the business had been completely forgotten. You can therefore say to anyone who says the things have been collected up: You're lying, for you simply do not know what is being said there,' meaning all the things about the heart and so on, where a new look is being taken.
The truth is that everything here comes from original investigation, and concerns the whole human being. Such simple things like people dancing, turning round and round, which I referred to the last time and today, in answer to Mr Burle's question, can show one a great deal. And one can understand it.
But, gentlemen, something else will then show itself, something of which humanity is most afraid. For you see, when anthroposophy wins through—today you can't do a thing; if you want to do anything practical, all hell is let loose immediately; and even if you just say things, opposition will immediately arise, as you know only too well—but when anthroposophy will have reached the point of entering into our schools, putting things into effect everywhere, something else will come. People will then know which movements are good for a person's health and the whole development of metabolic activity, and which are wrong. A time will then come when work will be adapted to the human being. Today work is determined by the machines. Today one has to move the way the people who discovered the machine think appropriate. Later people will find that what matters is not what comes from the machines but that what matters is the human being. Because of this all machines must be made for human beings. This is something that will only be possible once anthroposophy has been fully accepted. Then one will be able to say: everything mechanical must take its orientation from the human being.
Something else is needed for this, however. First we have to understand that the heart is not mechanical but takes its orientation from the human being. Then people will also find the basic principles for external machines, making them such that they take their orientation from the human being. But in a science which has so much taken the easy way that the heart is described as if the human being had just a pump there in his blood circulation, in such a science people will feel no compunction to make machines where the human being has to take his orientation from the machine. All the problems in our social situation are due to this wrong view that is taken in science. And so one really has to understand that a proper way of thinking must first of all come upon people, for only then will it be possible to begin a proper social life. For as long as people think the heart is a pump, they will also not be able to relate to outer life in the right way. It is only when people know that the invisible human being is greater than his heart, that it is he who moves the heart, that they will also design their machines to be in accord with human nature. One first has to begin to see this.
People make things much too easy for themselves today. They really make things much too easy for themselves. What is the most international thing today? Football. I explained this to you the other day.10See lecture of 30 May in this volume. But the things which are of the spirit are more and more limited to small groups and so on. It is all split up. You know, in Norway you'll hear them sing 'For he's a jolly good fellow', or you'll hear them sing a German song if the players come from Germany. But otherwise people go their own ways.
What we have to take hold of is the spirit, but in such a way that we take hold of it in detail. One should not speak of the spirit in general terms, but take hold of it in every detail.
We'll say more about this next Saturday.