Chapter 1: Early Years

Abstract

IT WAS IN THE EARLY PART of our century that a young man tried to become God. The place was Vienna; the period of his appearance was between 1908 and 1914. He made a deep impression upon his contemporaries. He had his apostles, his gospel, his apocrypha. The religious books in which his doctrine was expressed had profound reverberations throughout the intellectual world. The cruel wars and revolutions through which mankind has passed since have destroyed or dispersed most of the original witnesses, but some of them are still living, and I am one of them.