Heinrich, an eminent thinker of the last half-century, was born at Stavanger in Norway on the 2d of May 1773. Passing to Helsingør and Copenhagen, he entered the university of the latter city in 1790, and received a travelling prize four years afterwards. He resided successively at Bergen, Hamburg, Kiel, and Jena, and while in the latter town he became an enthusiast in the new philosophy which Schelling was then engaged in elaborating. Having been created adjunct professor of philosophy to the University of Jena, he then repaired to Freiberg, where he wrote his Geognostisch-Geologischen Aufsätze, which did not appear till 1810, and he elaborated his Handbuch der Oryklogonosie, 1811-19. Returning to Denmark in 1802, he delivered a course of able lectures, but finding himself more at home in the lecture-halls of Germany, he accepted an invitation in 1804 from the University of Halle, where he became professor, and published his Grundzüge der Philosophischen Naturwissenschaft in 1806. During the succeeding years he took a very active share in the political struggles in which Prussia was then engaged with France. In 1813 he was made professor of physics and natural history at Breslau, and in 1831 he removed to a similar chair at Berlin, where he remained till his death in 1845.

As illustrations of the labours of Steffens in behalf of Schelling's philosophy, we may point to his Anthropologie, published in 1822, and to his Polemische Blätter zur Förderung der Speculation Physik, 1825-35. Besides occasional essays on subjects more immediately connected with the university, he likewise engaged in the religious controversies of the time, and wrote on the Pietistic side with much more than the average amount of thought and originality. He subsequently engaged in a series of novels, which, while portraying with much lively interest the deep religious feeling of his sect, and displaying very correct delineations of picturesque scenery, nevertheless are tainted by too much egotism and display of the feelings and opinions of the writer. During the last five years of his life he was engaged on an autobiography Was ich erlebt, which was subsequently published in 10 vols. Schelling wrote a preface to the posthumous works of Steffens.