Steiner's 1922 finding that the human being creates matter while thinking and destroys it while willing, so conservation of matter fails inside us.
Creation and Destruction of Matter in Man in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's research result that the law of the conservation of matter does not hold inside the human being. He set it out in the fifth lecture of So That Man May Become Fully Human (GA 82), given at The Hague on 11 April 1922. In the nerve-sense system, Steiner said, matter is produced directly out of spirit as the soul enters the body on waking, so that thinking is literally substance-forming. In the metabolic and will system the opposite occurs: matter is consumed in what he called an organic combustion process and thrown back into nothingness, and the empty spaces this leaves are where deeds arise. The two poles balance across a lifetime, which is why measurement finds conservation intact and misses the double process underneath it. Anthroposophic physiology reads the human being from this polarity rather than from a single metabolic ledger.
The creation and destruction of matter in man names a polarity Steiner reported from intuitive observation rather than from measurement. Where the nerve-sense apparatus builds substance out of spirit, the will-organism burns substance away. Neither pole appears on a scale, because each cancels the other. What stays visible to physiology is a steady body. What stays hidden is the traffic that keeps it steady.
In Steiner's Own Words
In man, however, there is actually a real creation of matter through the nerve-sense apparatus. But we can state - read the first pages of psychologies that are written today out of incomplete knowledge - that the law of the conservation of matter also applies to man. This is based on an illusion. The law applies, but how? If we look with intuitive knowledge at the workings of the will in the human organism, that is, in the metabolic organism, the part of the organism that consists of metabolism, then matter is continually being destroyed through a process that I would call an organic combustion process. And so, while man develops thinking in normal consciousness, matter creation takes place; while man develops will, matter destruction takes place.
What it Means Today
The law Steiner called heretical to question was assembled by two men working from very different evidence. Antoine Lavoisier weighed sealed vessels before and after combustion and published the conservation of mass in his Traite elementaire de chimie in 1789. Julius Robert Mayer, a physician from Heilbronn, reached the conservation of energy through the human body itself. Sailing to Java in 1840 as ship's doctor on a Dutch merchant vessel, he noticed that the venous blood he drew from his crew in the tropics ran unexpectedly bright red, reasoned that less oxidation was needed to hold body heat in a hot climate, and worked back from that to the mechanical equivalent of heat, published in 1842 in Liebig's Annalen der Chemie und Pharmacie. The law that Steiner's Hague audience took as settled physics had been drawn out of bloodletting on a merchant ship, which is to say out of exactly the metabolic pole where Steiner says matter is being destroyed.
Thalira synthesis: Mayer and Steiner both treat the human being as the place where the question about substance gets decided, and they part on one point only, whether the ledger closes because nothing enters or leaves, or because two opposite motions cancel to zero. A student can hold both readings at once. The physicist measures the sum; Steiner claims to have watched the two terms separately. Nothing in the 1842 result forbids the second reading, since a balanced pair of processes returns the same number as no process at all.
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