Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/1452/en

A merely anatomical-functional consideration of the peritoneum illuminates little of its deeper significance. One notes a strong innervation, a film of moisture that enables the gliding of the organs of the abdominal and pelvic cavity — in particular of the small-intestine convolution — and the astonishingly high capacity for resorption of body fluids; in conjunction with the lymph and the lymph nodes, it provides detoxification — in the sense of a kind of digestion — of substances foreign to the body. This mode of consideration, restricting itself to more external facts, immediately widens when one asks after the significance of the strong innervation. An answer is given by the peritoneum itself. It is a sense organ that directs itself toward what takes place in highly specific activities within each individual organ of this inner space, and that simultaneously grasps the sum of these activities as a whole in unconsciousness, and from out of this whole coordinates and harmonises the organ activities with one another.