philosopher and physicist, who combined scientific ideas with German Idealist metaphysics.

Steffens spent his early years at Copenhagen, where he attended the university. He later studied at Kiel, Jena, and Berlin and by 1799 was an established figure in German literary and philosophical circles and on friendly terms with Schelling, Goethe, and Friedrich Schleiermacher. After publishing Beiträge zur innern Naturgeschichte der Erde (1801; “Contributions to the Internal Natural History of the Earth”), he took up an academic career, beginning as a lecturer at Copenhagen in 1802 and becoming professor of mineralogy at Halle in 1804 and professor of physics at Breslau in 1811. Steffens spent almost all his adult life in Germany, which he regarded as his home, and was a fervent supporter of German nationalism. He fought with the Prussian Army against Napoleon in 1813 and 1814. He was professor of physics at Berlin from 1832 until his death.

Steffens did much sound scientific work as a physicist, but as a philosopher he was characterized by a fondness for using scientific fact as a basis for the construction of fanciful analogies and quite arbitrary metaphysical conclusions. His exposition of a philosophy of nature in Grundzüge der philosophischen Naturwissenschaft (1806; “Philosophical Characteristics of Natural Science”) showed a typical combination of profound scientific knowledge and Schellingian speculation. He also wrote Anthropologie, 2 vol. (1824); an autobiography, Was ich erlebte, 10 vol. (1840–44; “What I Experienced”); and some novels and poetry.