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.For instance, let us look at the human eye.If we look at it in its totality we shall see that the nerves are continued right into the eye itself; but so also are the blood vessels.The presence of the nerves enables the activity of thought and cognition to stream into the eye of the human being; and the presence of the blood vessels enables the will activity to stream in.So also in the body as a whole, right into the periphery of the sense activities, the elements of will on the one hand and thought or cognition on the other hand are bound up with each other.This applies to all the senses and moreover it applies to the limbs, which serve the will: the element of cognition enters into our willing and into our movements through the nerves, and the element of will enters in through the blood vessels.But now we must also learn the special nature of the activities of cognition.We have already spoken of this, but we must be fully conscious of the whole complex belonging to this side of human activity, to thought and cognition.As we have already said, in cognition, in mental picturing lives antipathy.However strange it may seem, everything connected with mental picturing, with thought, is permeated with antipathy.You will probably say, “Yes, but when I look at something I am not exercising any antipathy in this looking.” But indeed you do exercise it.When you look at an object, you exercise antipathy.If nerve activity alone were present in your eye, everything you looked at would be an object of disgust to you, would be absolutely antipathetic to you.But the will, which is made up of sympathy, also pours its activity into the eye, that is, the blood in its physical form penetrates into the eye, and it is only by this means that the feeling of antipathy in sense-perception is overcome in your consciousness, and the objective, neutral act of sight is brought about by the balance between sympathy and antipathy.It is brought about by the fact that sympathy and antipathy balance one another, and by the fact also that we are quite unconscious of this interplay between sympathy and antipathy.If you take Goethe's Theory of Colour, to which I have already referred in this connection, and study especially the physiological-didactic part of it, you will see that it is because Goethe goes more deeply into the activity of sight that there immediately enters into his consideration of the finer shades of colour the elements of sympathy and antipathy.As soon as you begin to enter into the activity of a sense organ you discover the elements of sympathy and antipathy which arise in that activity.Thus in the sense activity itself the antipathetic element comes from the actual cognitive part, from mental picturing, the nerve part — and the sympathetic element comes from the will part, from the blood.As I have often pointed out in general anthroposophical lectures there is a very important difference between animals and man with regard to the constitution of the eye.It is a significant characteristic of the animal that it has much more blood activity in its eye than the human being.In certain animals you will even find organs which are given up to this blood activity, as for example the ensiform cartilage, or the “fan.” From this you can deduce that the animal sends much more blood activity into the eye than the human being, and this is also the case with the other senses.That is to say, in his senses the animal develops much more sympathy, instinctive sympathy with his environment than the human being does.The human being has in reality more antipathy to his environment than the animal only this antipathy does not come into consciousness in ordinary life.It only comes into consciousness when our perception of the external world is intensified to a degree of impression to which we react with disgust.This is only a heightened impression of all sense-perceptions; you react with disgust to the external impression.When you go to a place that has a bad smell and you feel disgust within the range of this smell, then this feeling of disgust is nothing more than an intensification of what takes place in every sense activity, only that the disgust which accompanies the feeling in the sense impression remains as a rule below the threshold of consciousness.But if we human beings had no more antipathy to our environment than the animal, we should not separate ourselves off so markedly from our environment as we actually do.The animal has much more sympathy with his environment, and has therefore grown together with it much more, and hence he is much more dependent on climate, seasons, etc., than the human being is.It is because man has much more antipathy to his environment than the animal has that he is a personality.We have our separate consciousness of personality because the antipathy which lies below the threshold of consciousness enables us to separate ourselves from our environment.Now this brings us to something which plays an important part in our comprehension of man.We have seen how in the activity of thought there flow together thinking (nerve activity as expressed in terms of the body) and willing (blood activity as expressed in terms of the body).But in the same way there flow together in actions of will the real will activity and the activity of thought.When we will to do something, we always develop sympathy for what we wish to do.But it would get no further than an instinctive willing unless we could bring antipathy also into willing, and thus separate ourselves as personalities from the action which we intend to perform [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]