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

that our consciousness in thinking is what we call waking consciousness. In this we clearly distinguish ourselves from the objects of our observation, and the logical connection of our thoughts is transparent as in mathematical thinking. It will also be evident that the mirrored thoughts of our consciousness are only images, and devoid of living reality. They can no longer rule us, we are free to move amongst them. But this killing of the living, active, thoughts into lifeless images represents also the archetypal activity of the nervous system, it is a paralysing action. The forms of our bodies are also the working of the nervous processes, which if unhindered would lead to our becoming frozen sculptured images, and to the living moving ever changing processes themselves becoming paralysed. Steiner insisted that all nerves are sensory. There are no real motor nerves, only sensory nerves of movement. Almost all modern research into nervous activity has to do either with electrical, chemical or metabolic processes or else with rhythmic processes such as are revealed in electroencephalograms. But these have to do with the metabolic or thythmic activity in the nervous organs and not with the true nervous function. Steiner emphasised that the true nervous function would not be accessible to ordinary physiological researches, and so it has proved. We are up against another of the limits of knowledge. Only when ideation is present is there neural activity. Only during thinking is the brain a brain. What can be observed by empirical physiology is never the neural function. “The activity of thenerves is precisely that in them which is not perceptible by the senses . . .’. To follow the nervous activity we shall have to make use of Imaginative cognition.

To turn now to the emotional life, where we experience the constant interplay of sympathy and antipathy, of love and hate, and all their development into complex emotions. The bodily foundation of this feeling Steiner finds in the rhythmic processes and more especially in the breathing rhythm. Ancient languages used the same word for breath and soul, as in the Latin Anima. Again, in the book of Genesis we read, ‘And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.’ Throughout the entire organism there are constant and most varied rhythmic movements: not only the in and out breathing

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