The matter
which I am
laying before the public in this book formed the content of
lectures which I delivered during last winter at the Theosophical
Library in Berlin. I had been requested by Grafin and Graf
Brockdorff ‘to speak upon Mysticism before an audience for whom the
matters thus dealt with constitute a vital question of the utmost
importance. Ten years earlier I could not have ventured to fulfil
such a request. Not that the realm of ideas, to which I now give
expression, did not even then live actively within me. For these
ideas are already fully contained in my philosophy
of Freedom (Berlin, 1894. Emil Felber). But
to give expression to this world of ideas in such wise as I do
today, and to make it the basis of an exposition as is done on the
following pages— to do this requires something quite other than
merely to be immovably convinced of the intellectual truth of these
ideas. It demands an intimate acquaintance with this realm of
ideas, such as only many years of life can give. Only now, after
having enjoyed that intimacy, do I venture to speak in such wise as
will be found in this book.
Any one who does not approach my world of ideas without
preconceptions is sure to discover therein contradiction after
contradiction. I have quite recently (Berlin, 1900. S. Cronbach)
dedicated a book upon the world conceptions of the nineteenth
century to that great naturalist, Ernst Haeckel, and closed it with
a defence of his thought-world.
In the following expositions, I speak about the Mystics, from
Master Eckhart to Angelus Silesius, with a full measure of devotion
and acquiescence. Other "contradictions,” which one critic or
another may further count up against me, I shall not mention at
all. It does not surprise me to be condemned from one side as a
"Mystic” and from the other as a “ Materialist.” When I find that
the Jesuit Father Muller has solved a difficult chemical problem,
and I therefore in this particular matter agree with him
unreservedly, one can hardly condemn me as an adherent of Jesuitism
without being reckoned a fool by those who have
insight.
Whoever goes his own road, as I do, must needs allow many a
misunderstanding about himself to pass. That, however, he can put
up with easily enough. For such misunderstandings are, in the main,
inevitable in his eyes, when he recalls the mental type of those
who misjudge him. I look back, not without humorous feelings, upon
many a “ critical” judgment that I have suffered in the course of
my literary career. At the outset, matters went fairly well. I
wrote about Goethe and his philosophy. What I said there appeared
to many to be of such a nature that they could file it in their
mental pigeon-holes. This they did by saying: “A work such as
Rudolf Steiner’s Introduction to Goethe s
Writings upon Natural Science may, without
hesitation, be described as the best that has been written upon
this question.”
When, later, I published an independent work, I had already
grown a good bit more stupid. For now a well meaning critic offered
the advice: “Before he goes on reforming further and gives
his Philosophy of Freedom
to the world, he should be pressingly advised first to
work himself through to an understanding of these two philosophers
[Hume and Kant].’’
The critic unfortunately knows only so much as he is himself
able to read in Kant and Hume; practically, therefore, he simply
advises me to learn to see no more in these thinkers than he
himself sees. When I have attained that, he will be satisfied with
me.
Then when my Philosophy and
Freedom appeared, I was found to be as much
in need of correction as the most ignorant beginner. This I
received from a gentleman who probably nothing else impelled to the
writing of books except that he had not understood innumerable
foreign ones. He gravely informs me that I should have noticed my
mistakes if I had “made more thorough studies in psychology, logic,
and the theory of knowledge” ; and he enumerates forthwith the
books I ought to read to become as wise as himself: “ Mill,
Sigwart, Wundt, Riehl, Paulsen, B. Erdmann.”
What amused me especially was this advice from a man who was
so “impressed” with the way he “understood” Kant that he could not
even imagine how any man could have read Kant and yet judge
otherwise than himself. He therefore indicates to me the exact
chapters in question in Kant's writings from which I may be able to
obtain an understanding of Kant as deep and as thorough as his
own.
I have cited here a couple of typical criticisms of my world
of ideas. Though in themselves unimportant, yet they seem to me to
point, as symptoms, to facts which present themselves to-day as
serious obstacles in the path of any one aiming at literary
activity in regard to the higher problems of knowledge. Thus I must
go on my way, indifferent, whether one man gives me the good advice
to read Kant, or another hunts me as a heretic because I agree with
Haeckel. And so I have also written upon Mysticism, wholly
indifferent as to how a faithful and believing materialist may
judge of me. I would only like— so that printers’ ink may not be
wasted wholly without need— to inform any one who may, perchance
advise me to read Haeckel’s Riddle of the
Universe, that during the last few months I
have delivered about thirty lectures upon the said
work.
I hope to have shown in this book that one may be a faithful
adherent of the scientific conception of the world and yet be able
to seek out those paths to the Soul along which Mysticism, rightly
understood, leads. I even go further and say: Only he who knows the
Spirit, in the sense of true Mysticism, can attain a full
understanding of the facts of Nature. But one must not confuse true
Mysticism with the “ pseudo-mysticism” of ill-ordered minds. How
Mysticism can err, I have shown in my
Philosophy of Freedom (page
131 et seq.).
Rudolf Steiner