Lecture Four

Now it behoves this age of the Consciousness Soul to realise that this is so—that living in conceptions is really living with ghosts. In this age of the Consciousness Soul it is extraordinarily important for man to face this significant fact. The men of old did not live in the age of the Consciousness Soul; hence they had no need to be aware that they were forming conceptions of ghosts. Our natural scientists also form conceptions of ghosts, but in this age of the Consciousness Soul it is our task to know that we also are forming conceptions of ghosts—not conceptions of nature but only of ghosts of nature. And as our forefathers were preceded by their own remote forefathers, who took ghosts to be images of divine activity, images of supersensible intelligence and not real in themselves, so by virtue of this age of the Consciousness Soul we have once more to rise again to a recognition of the truth: to recognise that our scientific ghosts have not the reality ascribed to them by modern scientists, but are only pointers to a reality which is to be sought through them. If we are deceived by the ghostly nature of natural science, we can never come to any clear knowledge of man. With our ghostly conceptions we are still able to perceive nature, for nature appears before our eyes in her true form; as to man himself, in the age of the Consciousness Soul we have to experience him consciously. It will not do to apply merely ghostly conceptions to man, for then we turn ourselves into ghosts. This has indeed happened to a very large extent.