Lecture Four

The theory of evolution, Goethe's theory of evolution, is not wrong; it takes the right direction because it wishes to grasp man in his reality. The materialistic theory of evolution, with its Darwinian colouring, talks of man's descent from the animals. The truth, however, is this—there is something in us which originates in the animals, or at least has a common origin with the animals, yet this is not what we are as human beings; it is the ghost that natural science takes for man. Science turns man also into a ghost because it knows him only as a ghostly phenomenon, and then it asks: Whence comes this ghost? When we reach the point of recognising that it is not man but only his ghost that can be dealt with in the manner of modern science, then in this sphere we shall reach the truth. You will surely be ready to admit that you would never have come here had you sent only Homunculus, the ghost, which is the conception of yourselves forced upon you by natural science. And if only the Homunculi who represent you in your consciousness were here, I should not be able to speak to them! You carry real human beings here with you, but not in your consciousness. The age of the Consciousness Soul, however, has to raise into consciousness the real man. From Homunculus he must rise to man. If this were not to come about, man would get to the point of experiencing the polaric opposite of his ghostly being. The men of old did conceive of themselves as ghosts, it is true, but they could also receive the reality because atavistic forces were still active in them, whereas into the men of to-day there can enter only what comes through the Consciousness Soul; and when in the Consciousness Soul man has only the ghost of himself, moral spiritual impulses cannot get through. And when you perceive the accompanying phenomena of a ghostly natural science, then you find that this modern age, with its ghostly natural science, will never allow that impulses for moral action come down from the spiritual world. The moral impulses with which men work to-day are of primeval origin, springing from times when atavistic forces were still strong; for people to-day, when impulses for action arise, will not ask the spirit, they will only ask nature: What is the nature of man? What kind of driving forces are there in human nature?