The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Preface to the First Edition, 1901

[ 1 ] What I present in this paper was previously the content of lectures I gave last winter in the Theosophical Library in Berlin. I was asked by Countess and Count Brockdorff to speak about mysticism to an audience for whom the issues involved are an important matter of life. - Ten years ago, I would not have dared to fulfill such a wish. Not as if the world of ideas that I am expressing today did not yet exist within me. This world of ideas is already fully contained in my "philosophy of freedom". But to express this world of ideas as I do today, and to make it the basis of a reflection as I do in this writing, requires something quite different from being rock-solidly convinced of its intellectual truth. It requires the kind of intimate contact with this world of ideas that only many years of life can bring. Only now, after having enjoyed this contact, do I dare to speak as you will perceive it in this writing.

[ 2 ] Anyone who does not open their mind to my world of ideas will discover contradiction after contradiction in it. I recently dedicated a book on the world views of the nineteenth century (Berlin 1900) to the great natural scientist Ernst Haeckel, and let it end in a justification of his world of ideas. In the following remarks, I speak with approving devotion about the mystics from Master Eckhart to Angelus Silesius. I don't even want to talk about other "contradictions" that this or that person still recounts to me. - I am not surprised when I am condemned by one side as a "mystic" and by the other as a "materialist". - If I find that the Jesuit Father Müller has solved a difficult chemical problem and I therefore agree with him wholeheartedly in this matter, then I must not be condemned as a follower of Jesuitism without being considered a fool by those of insight.

[ 3 ] Whoever, like me, goes his own way must endure many a misunderstanding. But basically he can easily bear it. Such misunderstandings are usually a matter of course for him when he realizes the way of thinking of those who judge him. It is not without humorous feelings that I look back on some of the "critical" judgments I have experienced in the course of my writing career. In the beginning, things went well. I wrote about Goethe and in reference to him. What I said there sounded to some people like they could fit it into their thought patterns. This was done by saying: "A work like Rudolf Steiner's introductions to Goethe's scientific writings can be described as the best that has ever been written on this question". When I later published an independent work, I had already become a good deal dumber. For now a well-meaning critic gave the following advice: "Before he goes on reforming and launching his 'philosophy of freedom' into the world, he is urgently advised to first work his way through to an understanding of those two philosophers (Hume and Kant)." Unfortunately, the critic only knows what he knows how to read in Kant and Hume; so he basically only advises me not to imagine anything further with these thinkers than he does: when I have achieved this, he will be satisfied with me. - When my "Philosophy of Freedom" appeared, I was in need of an assessment like the most ignorant beginner. It was bestowed upon me by a gentleman who is hardly compelled to write books by anything other than the fact that he has not understood countless foreign -. He taught me profoundly that I would have noticed my mistakes if I had "made deeper psychological, logical and epistemological studies"; and he immediately listed the books that I should read in order to become as clever as he was: "Mill, Sigwart, Wundt, Riehl, Paulsen, B. Erdmann". - I was particularly amused by the advice of a man who is so impressed by the way he "understands" Kant that he cannot imagine that anyone has read Kant and yet judges differently from him. He immediately gives me the relevant chapters in Kant's writings, from which I can draw as profound an understanding of Kant as he has.

[ 4 ] I have put a few typical assessments of my world of ideas here. Although they are insignificant in themselves, they seem to me to be suitable as symptoms of facts which today stand as serious obstacles in the way of those who are active as writers in the higher questions of knowledge. I must go my own way, regardless of whether one person gives me the good advice to read Kant, or whether the other heretizes me because I agree with Haeckel. And so I have also written about mysticism, regardless of what a believing materialist might judge. I would just like to inform those who might now advise me to read Haeckel's "Welträtsel" that I have given about thirty lectures on this book in the last few months, so that no unnecessary ink is wasted.

[ 5 ] I hope to have shown in my writing that one can be a faithful confessor of the scientific world view and yet seek out the paths to the soul which correctly understood mysticism leads. I go even further and say: Only those who recognize the spirit in the sense of true mysticism can gain a full understanding of the facts in nature. One must not confuse true mysticism with the "mysticism" of confused minds. I have shown how mysticism can err in my "Philosophy of Freedom" p. 139ff.

Berlin, September 1901
Rudolf Steiner