Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: NOVALIS THE AUTHOR HpHE pseudonym Novalis was chosen by Frie- derich v. Hardenberg when he began to publish his work, as having been the name of a branch of his family known in the sixteenth century as de Novali. His assumption of a nom de plume seems natural enough, a mere indication of the gap that existed between the practical life of Friederich v. Hardenberg and the soul- life of Novalis, and moreover the arrangement makes it possible to talk of that soul-life as the supreme element of the duality. Novalis was neither philosopher nor thinker in the exact sense of either word, but he was both religionist and poet. He was the true weaver of thoughts, who saw unity in the most divergent speculation, who detected analogies in contraries, who heard harmony in apparent dissonance, whose life seems to have been not so much an origination of thought as an attempt at the reconciliation of results, the resolution of antinomies, arrived at by a divine penetration. If one could use the wordFeeler or Intuitionist it would serve to indicate his mode of apprehending the underlying unities. Both Schiller and the Schlegels influenced Novalis in youth, but it was Fichte' the Great Ego, who was the determinator of his thought, and he remained inside the Fichtean philosophy all his life though at times he thought himself outside it. The influence of Hemsterhuys may be traced in his writings in various phrases such as these: the soul has endless organs of which so far we have only discovered the senses, if the other organs could be brought into play how open Nature would be, men ought to have the power of mingling with Divinity, Death accelerates our way to perfection, and in other instances as well. He seems to have helped Novalis to get away from the despotism of ...