The nature of man : approached through the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner

are totally sundered, as the philosophers Coleridge, Bergson, Whitehead and others have understood. This association between the head and the thinking mind was first made in Greek times by the Pythagoreans in Southern Italy. But the word phren (opty) also enshrines the earlier Greek experience of the mind in the diaphragm or midriff. At the beginning of the roth century Lavater, the creator of scientific physiognomy, related the intellectual, emotional and volitional faculties to the upper, middle and lower regions of the face respectively. It was a short step to relate these again to the head, chest and abdominal realms, a realisation that led Jaworski to his biological insights and synthesis. These were attempts to find spatial homes for the soul and its faculties of thinking, feeling and willing.

Steiner took up this question afresh and sought the bodily foundations of thinking, feeling and willing in the processes of the nerve-sense system, the rhythmic system, and the metaboliclimb system respectively. Each of these functional systems is all-

ervading. It is true that the nerve-sense processes predominate in the head, that rhythmic processes come to fullest expression in the rhythms of breathing and heart beat within the chest, and that the metabolic processes are most powerfully active in the abdomen and limbs, although extending throughout the organism. Nevertheless nerve-sense processes are everywhere, even in every cell, and equally there are metabolic and rhythmic processes in every nerve cell. The three processes interpenetrate and together form the whole.

Steiner understood the soul and spirit as real entities which are effectively active, and not as mere onlookers in the manner the experimental disciplines of science have enforced on us. During the embryonic and childhood periods these soul-spirit realities are active in the building and organising of the body as their physiognomic expression. The unconscious or superconscious thinking activity organises the brain, and having completed this task is progressively set free from its organic responsibilities, starting from the change of teeth at about seven years of age. It can then carry on its thinking as a pure spiritual activity. That we can become conscious of this activity is due to the brain, which acts as a mirror. Without this mirror we would not become conscious of our thinking. This reflecting process wakes us up so

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