Lecture Four

These words are symptomatic of important knowledge—knowledge of a more or less negative character, knowledge about present-day natural science. This natural science is meant to treat of nature; it is meant in a certain sense to bring home nature to modern consciousness in a conceptual way. If, however, we look around at these conceptions, which to-day are formed about nature in the most learned way, we find, curiously enough, that human consciousness is merely inventing ghosts; but whereas the people of old invented ghosts to represent the Gods, to-day they are invented to represent the facts of nature. For what modern men conceive as natural science is related to nature as a ghost is related to reality. It was indeed divined by Richard Wahle that the age of the Consciousness Soul had come to this conclusion: We are not after all so superior to our forefathers; they used the forces of consciousness and formed conceptions of ghosts; we too form conceptions of ghosts. The only difference is that they had more beautiful ghosts than those invented by scientific thinkers, which, to speak the truth, are a horrible weaving in abstract concepts. But they are ghosts, just as the ghosts pictured by our forefathers were ghosts. And these ghosts of natural science are related to reality, this ghostly natural science itself is related to reality, in the same way as the ghosts of old were related to divine reality.