The Gates of Knowledge

by Rudolf Steiner

Before man enters the Path of the Higher Knowledge, he only knows the first of its four stages. It is the one which in ordinary life belongs strictly to the world of the senses. Even in what is called -science, - he has to do only with this first grade of knowledge; for such science only deals with ordinary knowledge more minutely and in a disciplined way. By means of instruments such as the microscope, the telescope, etc., he makes the senses more effective, and discloses to them what they could not otherwise perceive. But he is still on the same plane of knowledge, whether he sees large things with the naked eye, or observes very small objects and phenomena by the aid of a microscope. Also in the application of thought to facts and things, such science still remains in the field of every-day life. Man arranges the objects, describes and compares them, seeks to picture to himself their variations, and so forth. The keenest naturalist does nothing fundamentally, in this respect, beyond bringing to a fine aft the methods of investigating every-day life. His knowledge takes a wider range, becomes more complex and more logical, but he does not come one step nearer to any other mode of cognition.

92 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1912

About the author

Author also wrote under the name Rudolph Steiner.

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Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory.
In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions,  differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked on various ostensibly applied projects, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine.
Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world view in which "thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." A consistent thread that runs through his work is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge.