no better way of doing this can be found than through the medium of his autobiography , the course of my life , written during the last months of his life when he had reached the age of sixty-one and was able to survey , with the peculiar clarity that sometimes comes with age , his early years , the gradual development of his own powers and the varied influences that came to him through the many friends into whose orbits he was attracted . the warmth of his nature and his lively interest in his fellow human beings is apparent in all his descriptions of the men and women that he met - whether in the charmed circles of the literary world of Vienna in the &apos;eighties , or in the near-utopian cultural climate of Weimar , where he worked in the Goethe Institute , or in the rough and tumble of journalistic life in Berlin , where he edited the magazin fu&quot;r literatur . he did not find agreement in opinion a necessary condition for friendship : I loved the many-sidedness of life , he said . the book was never finished , for his illness and death intervened while he was in the course of writing it . but it carries his story to the early years of this century and gives a comprehensive picture of all that led up to his life-work . Rudolf Steiner was born at the little village of Kraljevec in southern Austria on the border between Hungary and Croatia . his parents both belonged to the lower Austrian forest region , north of the Danube , and in the small town of Geras his father had passed his childhood and youth in close association with the seminary of the Premonstratensian order , where he was instructed by the monks . later he became a gamekeeper to Count Hoyos on his estate at Horn but on his marriage changed this occupation and took the job of telegraphist on the southern Austrian railway . he remained a countryman at heart and the new work was uncongenial but he was soon promoted to be station-master of Pottschach in lower Austria . at this little railway station , with the magnificent scenery of the Styrian Alps before him , Rudolf Steiner spent the formative years from two to eight . he was much absorbed , as any other small boy would be , in the daily business of the railway . his father taught him his letters and his own insatiable curiosity about the world and its ways taught him many other things , such as the complete process of milling which he learnt from constant visits to the local mill . but there were many problems that exercised his active mind . I was filled with questions , he says , and I had to carry these questions about with me unanswered . it was thus that I reached my eighth year . during this year the family moved to Neudorff in Hungary , and here they remained until Rudolf Steiner was seventeen . the Alps were now visible only in the distance but near at hand were mountains easier to climb and great forests where the peasants gathered wood . with his parents , his sister and his brother , Rudolf walked and climbed , bringing back wild fruits for supper . but he preferred to walk alone , and to talk to the peasants that he met . with them , he took part every year in the vintage and with their children he went to the village school . it was through the assistant master at this school that the first great event of his life took place - an event that , he believed , influenced the whole course of his development and of his future work ; it was the discovery , in his teacher &apos;s room , of a text book on geometry . he was allowed to borrow it and through it he felt the deepest satisfaction he had yet known , for by this science he found justification for his own assumption that the reality of the unseen world is as certain a fact as the reality of the physical world . it seemed to him to be a form of knowledge which man appeared to have produced but which had a significance quite independent of man . he had found unaided something that gave confirmation of the unseen world , a world of which he had been aware even before his eighth year and in which he longed to live . had not the seen received light from the unseen he would , he said , have been forced to feel the physical world as if it were a kind of darkness around him . another outstanding event that took place in his tenth year , and that was to bear fruit in later life , was his introduction , through the local priest , to the system of Copernicus . astronomy became as absorbing a study to him as the mechanism of the railway had once been . he had now formed an attachment to the priest and also to the Church , where he was a server and a chorister . he entered into his duties with sensitive participation , and found in the sonorous beauty of the Latin liturgy a vital happiness . it was to him a means of mediation between his two worlds . but it was not a soporific , for through the music and in contemplation of the ritual he saw the riddle of existence rising before him in powerful and suggestive fashion . he makes the rather sad little comment that in the matter of this early religious experience he was a stranger in his father &apos;s house , for his father had temporarily shed his piety and become a free-thinker . Rudolf Steiner &apos;s home could offer him no cultural background . his father , a warm-hearted , quick-tempered , gregarious man felt no need for books and loved nothing better than a political argument with the local worthies under the lime trees on a summer evening , with the mother , a good Hausfrau , sitting beside him with her knitting and the children playing around . Rudolf Steiner was indebted to the local doctor for his introduction to German literature . pacing up and down beside the station , the tall , enthusiastic doctor opened up a new world to the eager little boy . for the first time he heard of Goethe , with whose conception of nature his own future was to be so closely linked , and of Schiller , from whose letters a few sentences were to wake the train of thought that led him to the perception that man has the possibility of changing his state of consciousness . the doctor &apos;s literary influence happily continued when the boy was sent to the Realschule in Wiener-Neustadt , a secondary school where prominence was given to science and modern languages . this school was chosen because the father had determined that his promising son should become a civil engineer . the boy himself was indifferent as to what school he attended provided he could get some satisfactory answers to the vital questions he bore within him on life and the world and the soul . Rudolf Steiner devotes a chapter of his book to this period of his school-days and it is evident that his powers of thought were far in advance of those of the average boy , and that the scientific method of approach to the problems of existence - an approach which later he came to regard as essential for modern man - was his by natural proclivity . when he was barely eleven he read a paper published by his head-master on attraction considered as an effect of motion . though he understood but little of it , for it began with higher mathematics , he derived sufficient meaning from certain passages to build a bridge between it and what he had learnt from the priest of Neudorff on the creation of the world . he then saved his pocket money until he could buy a book by the same author on the general motion of matter as the fundamental cause of all the phenomena of nature . the study of these two works , combined with his studies in mathematics and physics , took him through his third and fourth year and finally brought him to the conclusion that he must go to nature in order to win a standing place in the spiritual world . this spiritual world he consciously perceived lying before him . further , he said to himself : one can take the right attitude towards the experience of the spiritual world by one &apos;s own soul only when the process of thinking has reached such a form that it can attain to the reality of being which is in natural phenomena . he then discovered Kant . he had never heard of him but saw the critique of pure reason in a shop window and could not rest until he had bought it , for he longed to know what the human reason could achieve in gaining genuine insight into what he called the being of things . how does one pass , he asked himself , from simple clear-cut perceptions to concepts in regard to natural phenomena ? sometimes he would read one page of the critique twenty times over in order to arrive at a definite decision as to the relation sustained by human thought to the creative work of nature . but he made no advance through Kant . the study was by no means valueless , however , for he was already subjecting himself to that severe discipline in thinking that was sustained throughout his life and which he demanded of his pupils . he wished so to construct thought within himself that every thought could be objectively surveyed , without any identification with feeling . thus he was no mystic . from his earlier emotional reaction to the beauty of the liturgy he now tried to establish within himself a harmony between objective thinking and the dogma and symbolism of religion . this attempt , he said , in no way diminished his reverence and devotion . his relation to the teachings of religion was determined , he states , by the fact that to me the spiritual world counted among the objects of human perception . the very reason why these teachings penetrated so deeply into my mind was that in them I realized how the human spirit can find its way consciously into the supersensible . it was a natural result to arrive at the question : to what extent is it possible to prove that in human thinking real spirit is the agent ? and , furthermore , to debate from this basis the possible scope of human thinking . with these problems uppermost in his mind Rudolf Steiner entered the Technische Hochschule in Vienna , and at once proceeded to buy a large number of books on philosophy . he had now decided to become a teacher , and had already done a certain amount of coaching . he enrolled for mathematics , natural history and chemistry , and was fortunate in having as his lecturer in physics Edmond Reitlinger , the author of freie Blicke . he could not accept the prevailing mechanical theory of heat nor the wave theory of light , and through them was driven to a study of theories of cognition . the Darwinian theory of evolution seemed to him fruitful in so far as the higher organisms derive from the lower , but to reconcile this idea with what he knew of the spiritual world was immeasurably difficult , for he conceived of the inner man as dipping down from the spiritual world and uniting with the organism in order to perceive and to act in the physical world . he had now come to realize , through his own struggles to win concepts in natural science , that the activity of the human ego must be the sole starting point for arriving at true knowledge . previously he had worked from the opposite premise , first observing the phenomena of nature in order to derive from them a concept of the ego . now he saw that he must penetrate nature &apos;s process of becoming from the activity of the ego . he was now about nineteen , an age when the sense of the ego begins to assert itself more fully , and from this time onwards he was gradually to expand his understanding of the spiritual and the eternal nature of man &apos;s ego and its relation to the evolution of his consciousness . 