Steiner's answer to William Crookes: a sense organ for electricity and magnetism would also hand its owner the power to kill at will.
What are Organs for Electricity and Magnetism?
Organs for Electricity and Magnetism in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's term for the sense organs humanity does not possess, and for the moral reason it does not possess them. Speaking in Stockholm on 10 June 1913, in the cycle published as The World of the Spirit and Its Impact on Physical Existence (GA 150), Steiner took up a thought experiment of the English chemist William Crookes, who imagined beings whose organs registered electric current and magnetic force the way human eyes register colour. Steiner granted the premise and then added the consequence Crookes had missed: an organ that perceives electricity and magnetism directly is at the same moment an instrument of power, conferring the ability to kill or sicken any other person at will. Humanity is therefore withheld from these senses by the wisdom of earthly evolution, until the lower instincts have been placed at the service of higher motives.
Organs for electricity and magnetism are the perceptive organs Steiner said human beings were mercifully denied. Because electrical and magnetic forces run through the human organism itself, a sense that read them directly would double as a weapon. Steiner treated the withholding not as a limit on knowledge but as a protection granted while morality is still being learned.
In Steiner's Own Words
Let us suppose that we ask the question: What would it be like if, instead of eyes, man really had these organs to perceive electricity and magnetism directly, if this idea, which a person naively puts forward, were realized in us humans, what would it be like? Then we human beings would find our way around in the realm of electricity and magnetism just as directly as we now find our way around in the realm of light and sound. But that would have a consequence. If man had an organ for the direct perception of electricity and magnetism, then, at the same time as this organ, which would then be an organ of knowledge for him, he would have the power and the authority to kill or make sick every other human being. This ability would be conferred directly by such an organ.
What it Means Today
Crookes was speculating about creatures that might sense electricity and magnetism directly. Marine biology found them. The jelly-filled pores on a shark's snout were described in 1678 by the Italian anatomist Stefano Lorenzini, who could not say what they were for. In 1962 Sven Dijkgraaf and Adrianus Kalmijn at Utrecht showed that the ampullae of Lorenzini respond to voltage gradients, and Kalmijn's 1971 paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology demonstrated the consequence: a shark can locate a flatfish buried in sand, in complete darkness, purely by the weak bioelectric field leaking from its gills. The organ Crookes imagined exists, and what it is used for is killing.
Thalira synthesis: the shark is the empirical footnote to Steiner's moral argument, since the one animal fitted with a direct electric sense uses it as a hunting instrument rather than as an instrument of knowledge, which is exactly the coupling of perception and power Steiner said the human being is not yet ready to carry.
Steiner's point in Stockholm was that the human sensory boundary is a moral schedule rather than an accident of biology. Anyone working on inner development can test it in a smaller register: notice how quickly an accurate perception of another person's weakness turns into a means of control, and how much self-education stands between seeing and using.
Where to Read More
- The World of the Spirit and Its Impact on Physical Existence, GA 150
- Find this lecture cycle at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]