This experiment demonstrates that with respect to the phenomena of color in all their aspects, "we are in them—not, it is true, with our ordinary body, but certainly with our etheric body and thereby also with the astral part of our being."

And now Steiner goes from light to heat (warmth, or fire). There is a very significant difference between the perception of light and the perception of warmth. You can localize the perception of light clearly and accurately in the physical apparatus of the eye. For warmth the whole of me is, so to speak, the sense organ, it is what my eye is for the light. We are swimming in the warmth element of our environment. What is it that is swimming when you are swimming in the warmth of your environment? He mentions the experiment of putting both hands in a bucket of lukewarm water to test it. Then put your left hand in water as hot as you can bear and your right in water as cold as you can bear. Then put both back into the lukewarm water. The latter will then seem very warm to your right hand and cold to your left, whereas before, it felt lukewarm to both. It is your own warmth that is swimming there. It makes you feel the difference between itself and your environment. It is your own warmth brought about by your own organic process. This is far from being an unconscious thing, for your consciousness indwells it. Inside your skin you are living in this warmth, and from that you converse with the element of warmth in your environment.

So we swim in both the elements of light and warmth. But so too do we swim in the element of air, which we also have within us. We are to a very small extent solid bodies, being over ninety percent a column of water which is a kind of intermediary between the airy and the solid. Our consciousness descends into the airy element even as it enters into the elements of light and warmth. Here again it can "converse"—communicate with what is taking place in our environment of air. It is precisely this "conversation" that finds expression in the phenomena of sound or tone. We live in and with the respective elements of light, warmth or air at different levels of consciousness. Our consciousness dives down into air, and we are thus able to perceive sound. We must have something of the airy element in us in order to be able to so perceive. Through our breathing and the movement of the diaphragm, we raise and lower the level of cerebro-spinal fluid as an image of this rhythmic process. In that my bodily organism partakes in these oscillations of the breathing process, there is an inner differentiation enabling me to perceive and experience the airy element in consciousness. We are thus an organ of vibrations, which in our ear we bring to bear upon what sounds toward us from without. The real process of hearing is, as you see, very far removed from the abstraction commonly presented.

Comparing Three Sense Organs

Thus we have these three stages in a human being's relation to the outer world, namely, light, warmth and sound. But there is a remarkable fact about them. It is only with the etheric body that you can live in the element of light. You live in warmth with your whole bodily nature. Further down, the air in which we swim is the external physical matter of air (though it is also within us). Our life of warmth is for our consciousness a kind of midway level. It is portrayed as follows (note how this corresponds with I-22):

 

Element/Ether	Sense Organ	Domain in which Perceived
Light	Eye	Etheric body and world
Warmth	Whole body	Border of etheric/material
Sound/Air	Ear	Material air

For light we ascend as it were into a higher etheric sphere to live in our consciousness, while we descend into materiality to perceive sound, and come again to terms with the outer world in regard to warmth in the border between them.

Steiner speaks of the psychology of his time (1919) as being in an even sorrier position than physiology and physics, having been only too well disciplined by the churches to stay away from soul and spirit and focus on external apparatus—in a mere collection of words. Psychology speaks of a science of the senses as though there were such a thing as a sense organ in general, without realizing how completely different such organs are.⁴⁸

Steiner traces the historical development of natural science's treatment of sound and light—first of the velocity of sound, then of its sympathetic vibrations, then of its characteristics of intensity, pitch and quality, and then of the nature of its waves assumed to be longitudinal. He notes the special contribution of the Jesuits in this branch of physics, largely because they accepted the idea of keeping the spiritual element out of the study of nature, studying it in purely materialistic ways, the first to do what is today so prevalent.

He reminds us of the prior discussion that outward realities can never be merely spatial, arithmetical, or time-bound (in accord here with Einstein's then new theory of relativity). So we must look at a qualitative study of sound rather than only at the quantitative as physics does. But today there is surrender to the concept that sound is simply vibrations while recognizing that there is something within us that transforms these objective phenomena into subjective experiences. To deny light and sound the inner life and being that is experienced in a seemingly subjective way is precisely as it would be if, having you here before me, I looked on all that is before me as merely part of my subjective life, and thus denied to you the experience of inner life and being.

This is so obvious and trite that scientists would naturally not presume they could ever fall into such an obvious mistake. And yet they do. The whole distinction usually made of subjective impression from objective process amounts to this and nothing else. The physicist could, of course, say that he does not enter into what is qualitative and thus he would be candid. But he must not then go on to say that the one is "objective" and the other "subjective," or that the one is the "effect" of the other.

How easily it can be argued that the oscillatory character of sound is evident. Yet we do not understand what is happening in such a case unless we bring it into connection with a more widespread phenomenon. For instance, the sympathetic vibrations obvious in the laboratory actually extend to a wider domain. We see it in the sympathetic going-together of events attuned to one another which are making themselves felt in a highly spiritual realm. Consider the parallel phenomena of much more spiritual nature as when we experience one another's thoughts, or when the same thoughts occur throughout the world more or less simultaneously.

As he did earlier for the human eye, Steiner now gives the successive stages from outer to inner in the human ear as follows:

(a) External auditory canal

(b) Drum (inner end of the canal)

(c) Hammer, anvil and stirrup (minute bones or ossicles behind the drum)

(d) Three semi-circular canals, their planes at right angles to each other according to the three dimensions of space

(e) Cochlea, filled with a kind of fluid

(f) Auditory nerve

So we have the eye as one sense organ and the ear as another. If they are put side by side, science may abstractly elaborate a general physiology of the senses and sensation. But recall what was said about the rhythm of the ascending and descending cerebro-spinal fluid and how it interacts with what is taking place externally in the outer air, enabling us to perceive and experience the airy element in consciousness. Remember too that a thing may look complete and self-contained when outwardly regarded, but we must not therefore take it to be a finished reality. Here again he gives the cut rose as an example, and how we must go on to the totality. So too for hearing; the ear alone is no reality, though nearly always so represented. What is transmitted inward must first interact in a certain way with the inner rhythm, manifested in the rise and fall of the cerebro-spinal fluid. But even then we still have not reached the end.