Steiner's name for the lost lineage of post-idealist thinkers who reached toward knowledge of a supersensible human being and so anticipated anthroposophy.
The Forgotten Stream in German Spiritual Life in Anthroposophy is Steiner's name for the lineage of post-idealist thinkers, Troxler, Immanuel Hermann Fichte, Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, Johann Heinrich Deinhardt, Karl Christian Planck and Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss, who pressed German idealism toward a knowledge of the supersensible human being. In Riddles of the Soul (GA 20, 1917), Steiner traces how these figures, working after Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, sensed an inner, spirit-soul man that ordinary academic philosophy could not hold. Troxler even used the word anthroposophy for this science of the higher human. Official philosophy forgot them, yet their striving anticipated the spiritual science Steiner founded. The stream names a hidden continuity, a current of seeking that ran beneath nineteenth-century German thought before it slipped from memory.
The Forgotten Stream in German Spiritual Life is Rudolf Steiner's term for a buried lineage of German thinkers who, after Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, reached toward direct knowledge of the supersensible human being. Troxler, Immanuel Hermann Fichte, Schubert, Deinhardt, Planck and Preuss each pressed idealism past the limits of mere thinking, then fell from the academic record before anthroposophy named what they sought.
In Steiner's Own Words
Like Immanuel Hermann Fichte, Troxler also feels himself in his thinking to be standing within a supersensible world. But he also senses how the human being, when he removes himself from the power that binds him to the senses, can do more than place himself before a world that in the Hegelian sense is thought by him; through this removal he can experience within his inner being the blossoming of a purely spiritual means of knowledge through which he spiritually beholds a spiritual world, like the senses behold the sense world in sense perception.
What it Means Today
For most of the twentieth century, academic histories of German philosophy ran a straight line from Kant through Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, then declared idealism finished. The figures Steiner gathered into the forgotten stream simply dropped out of that line. Recent scholarship has begun to recover them. The historian of philosophy Frederick Beiser, in After Hegel: German Philosophy 1840 to 1900 (Princeton University Press, 2014), argues that the standard story is wrong, that a rich and serious philosophical culture continued after Hegel rather than collapsing into positivism. Troxler's own writing has returned to print through the Swiss Troxler-Edition overseen by the Ignaz-Paul-Vital-Troxler society, and Immanuel Hermann Fichte is read again by scholars of nineteenth-century personalism and the philosophy of the soul.
Thalira synthesis: what Beiser reconstructs as a social and intellectual history, the survival of post-Hegelian inquiry, Steiner read from the inside as a stream of cognition, a sequence of souls each catching the same supersensible spark and carrying it one step further. A reader can do something concrete with this. Take Troxler's Lectures on Philosophy or Immanuel Hermann Fichte's writings on the soul body, set them beside Riddles of the Soul, and watch a question pass from hand to hand: whether thinking, pressed far enough, opens onto a perception of the spirit. The forgotten stream is less a doctrine than an invitation to read these neglected books as living attempts, not museum pieces.
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