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.The chief preventative measure is first and foremost to do everything to preserve and improve the health of women, for in that case, the extra-telluric influence is drawn more actively into our earth process, and those processes which work continuously to transmit the harmful influences of heredity through the germ, can be combatted through the maternal organism.Thus a community which gives thought and care to the health of their women, wages war against the harmful influence which springs from the earth-forces in heredity, by means of an appeal to the forces proceeding from outside the earth, and acting as a counterbalance.For these cosmic celestial forces have, as it were, their earthly accumulator solely in the organism of a woman.This is most important, and holds good for all forces of telluric and cosmic origin; it is universally true.It becomes conspicuously evident in the case of hæmophiliacs, of so-called “bleeders.” It would be well if there were less vague talk about heredity, and more study where concrete facts point unmistakably to its operation.Observe this as shown among “bleeders.” You will find a striking phenomenon, known to you all, and illustrating what I have just pointed out.In the family descent among hæmophiliacs bleeding itself only appears in males, but the transmission of the illness occurs only through females.A woman whose father was a hæmophiliac, though she does not exhibit the disease herself, is liable to bequeath it to her male descendants.She gets it because she is part of the family.She gets it because she is part of the family.The males, however, become bleeders.But if these marry women free from hæmophiliac descent, the disease is not transmitted.If you analyse the aforesaid facts, you will find a striking concrete expression of my statements, and indeed the facts of hæmophilia are far clearer proofs than all the recent experiments by Weismann, etc., of what happens in heredity.And they are also important for the general judgment of the human bodily organisation; this organisation must be to some degree estimated in the light of that which is apt to influence it.What is the actual basis of hæmophilia? This can in fact be detected by superficial consideration.The blood does not coagulate properly, so that the slightest external scratch or prick may cause the hæmophiliac to bleed to death; they may die from attacks nose bleeding, or the extraction of a tooth, for what would lead to coagulation in other persons does not do so in the case of a hæmophiliac.So the blood of these persons must possess some constituent or quality, which counteracts the power of coagulation.If this quality exists in too potent a degree, it is not neutralised by the external forces which begin to work from outside when the blood coagulates.For coagulation of the blood is caused by forces working from outside.If the blood possesses a quality which does not allow these external forces to prevail, there is an excessive tendency to fluidity of the blood.It is easy to detect that a strong tendency to excessive fluidity is connected with the whole formation of the human ego.And not superficially but deeply, and with that which manifests in the human ego as will, not with that which manifests as “Ideation.” The constitutional tendency to excessive fluidity in the human blood is associated with all that either strengthens or debilitates the human will.And there is a fine historical example which proves that certain of nature's secrets are accessible to a proper interpretation.Both history and science are aware of the Engadine case; you will probably know it — the case of those two young girls of the Engadine district who have furnished us with a light on some profound — and medically helpful — aspects of human nature.Both of these young women came of hæmophiliac stock, and both formed and kept the steadfast and courageous resolution to refrain from marriage.So they have their place in history as personal champions of the fight against hereditary hæmophilia.Of course we must lay stress on the real core of this case.It is certainly not peculiar to all the girls in hæmophiliac families to withdraw in this way from propagation.For such a course of action a strong subjective will must be developed; just the kind of strong subjective will that operates in the ego, and not in the astral body.Such a peculiar will power must have distinguished both of those young women.They must have both had something in their egos, in their power of will, that was connected in some manner with the forces operative in bleeders.If such forces are augmented in a conscious way, this could be done more easily in such cases than in persons who are non-bleeders.A just estimate of this interaction leads us to look into the specific forces and properties of the blood and their interplay with the extra-human world.And in studying those properties of blood that are associated with the conscious will, we can learn something of the general connection between the human will and the forces external to man.Certain of these external forces have a particular inner kinship with the forces of the human will, a kinship based on the course of evolution for the very last to be separated out in the natural realm, has been all that is connected with the conscious will of mankind.That is the latest precipitation to emerge in the realm of nature.Let us now study something in external nature which is among the creations by which nature framed mankind, and which shows by its inherent qualities its association with that formative process of humanity.A substance of that description has long been a subject of study, and there are great difficulties in surveying the results because it is hard to make the forces preserved by atavistic medicine into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries active still in the intellectual modern man.The substance thus studied was antimony and all that is linked with it.Antimony is a most remarkable substance; it has attracted the most profound attention from all who have had much to do with it, including the legendary Basilius Valentinus.Certain attributes of this substance will reveal the peculiar manner in which it is interwoven with the whole process of nature.Consider, for example, what is perhaps the least of antimony's attributes: its extraordinary affinity to other metals and other non-metallic substances, so that it often appears in combination with other substances, especially with sulphur compounds [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]