CW 170 The Riddle of Humanity: Lecture 8 (Dornach, 13 August 1916) by Rudolf Steiner
Oct 6, 2026 · 53 min · 13 segments
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Oct 6, 2026 · 53 min · 13 segments
The kind of truths we passed in review before our souls yesterday cannot be absorbed with an abstract theoretical understanding.
It is not just a matter of knowing that things are like this or like that.
All the human consequences of these things must be inwardly comprehended, for they are very significant.
Today I will sketch just a few of them.
There is of course very much more that could be said along these lines, but we have to begin somewhere.
At the very least we must consider the direction in which such factual spiritual-scientific presuppositions lead our thinking and our will.
Let us review yesterday's conclusions.
The zones of the twelve senses can be seen as a kind of human zodiac.
Flowing through all these sense zones are the seven life processes, breathing, warming, nourishing, secretion, maintenance, growth, and reproduction.
See drawing in Lecture 7.
To understand these things in their entirety, we must be clear that the actual truth is very different from what our materialistic sciences teach us.
They believe, for example, that the sense of taste and the related sense of smell are confined to the narrow limits of the tongue and the nasal mucous membrane.
But this is not how things really are.
The physical organs associated with the senses are more like the capital cities governing the realms of those senses.
The realms corresponding to the senses are much more extended.
I think that anyone who has applied a little self-observation to the sense of hearing, for example, will know that hearing involves much more of the organism than just the ears.
A tone lives in much more of the organism than just the ear.
And the other senses occupy similarly extended territories.
Liver and spleen, for example, are perceptibly involved in taste and the related sense of smell.
So they involve a wider area than materialistic science recognizes.
This being the case, you will also see that the sense zones are intimately connected with the vital organs and with the life forces they continuously send streaming through the entire organism.
It follows that the relationship between the sense zones and the vital organs has a manifold influence on a person's inner constitution, on his state of being as regards spirit, soul, and body.
So we are justified in speaking, let us say, of the forces of secretion being in the sphere of the sense of sight, or of their interacting with the sphere of sight, or of an interaction between the spheres of growth and hearing, just as we speak in astronomy of Saturn being in the ram or of the sun standing in the lion.
Furthermore, each sense zone can come into a relationship with one or the other of the life spheres, since the regions of the senses and the regions of life are related differently in different people.
So there really are circumstances in the inner human world that reflect how things are out there in the starry heavens of the macrocosm.
The kind of truths we passed in review before our souls yesterday cannot be absorbed with an abstract theoretical understanding.
It is not just a matter of knowing that things are like this or like that.
All the human consequences of these things must be inwardly comprehended, for they are very significant.
Today I will sketch just a few of them.
There is of course very much more that could be said along these lines, but we have to begin somewhere.
At the very least we must consider the direction in which such factual spiritual-scientific presuppositions lead our thinking and our will.
Let us review yesterday's conclusions.
The zones of the twelve senses can be seen as a kind of human zodiac.
Flowing through all these sense zones are the seven life processes, breathing, warming, nourishing, secretion, maintenance, growth, and reproduction.
See drawing in Lecture 7.
To understand these things in their entirety, we must be clear that the actual truth is very different from what our materialistic sciences teach us.
They believe, for example, that the sense of taste and the related sense of smell are confined to the narrow limits of the tongue and the nasal mucous membrane.
But this is not how things really are.
The physical organs associated with the senses are more like the capital cities governing the realms of those senses.
The realms corresponding to the senses are much more extended.
I think that anyone who has applied a little self-observation to the sense of hearing, for example, will know that hearing involves much more of the organism than just the ears.
A tone lives in much more of the organism than just the ear.
And the other senses occupy similarly extended territories.
Liver and spleen, for example, are perceptibly involved in taste and the related sense of smell.
So they involve a wider area than materialistic science recognizes.
This being the case, you will also see that the sense zones are intimately connected with the vital organs and with the life forces they continuously send streaming through the entire organism.
It follows that the relationship between the sense zones and the vital organs has a manifold influence on a person's inner constitution, on his state of being as regards spirit, soul, and body.
So we are justified in speaking, let us say, of the forces of secretion being in the sphere of the sense of sight, or of their interacting with the sphere of sight, or of an interaction between the spheres of growth and hearing, just as we speak in astronomy of Saturn being in the ram or of the sun standing in the lion.
Furthermore, each sense zone can come into a relationship with one or the other of the life spheres, since the regions of the senses and the regions of life are related differently in different people.
So there really are circumstances in the inner human world that reflect how things are out there in the starry heavens of the macrocosm.
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