What in Fichte and the men of the Revolution is clear reason, comprehending and testing everything, is in Novalis an all-absorbing self--perception, which becomes actual voluptuousness; for the new spirit has taken such a hold upon him that it is, as it were, entwined round his nerves, causing a species of voluptuous excitement. What with them is abstract liberty, liberty to begin everything from the beginning again, with him is lawless fancy, which changes everything, which resolves nature and history into emblems and myths, in order to be able to play at will with all that is external, and to revel unrestrainedly in self-perception. As Arnold Ruge puts it: "Mysticism, which is theoretical voluptuousness, and voluptuousness, which is practical mysticism, are present in Novalis in equally strong proportions." Novalis is himself thoroughly conscious that, in spite of all its would-be spirituality, his hectic imagination inclines towards the sensual. Writing to Caroline Schlegel on the subject of _Lucinde_, he says: "I know that imagination (Fantasie) is most attracted by what is most immoral, most animal; but I also know how like a dream all imagination is, how it loves night, meaninglessness, and solitude." He here affirms of imagination in general what applied particularly to his own. Tieck writes with enthusiasm of music, as teaching us to _feel feeling_. Novalis is a living interpretation of these words. He, whose aim is feeling, unrestrained, irresponsible feeling, desires to feel himself, and makes no secret of the fact that he seeks this self-enjoyment. Therefore to him sickness is preferable to health. For the sick man perpetually feels his own body, which the healthy man does not. Pascal, and our own Kierkegaard, contented themselves with defining sickness as the Christian's natural condition. Novalis goes much further. To him the highest, the only true life, is the life of the sick man. "_Leben ist eine Krankheit des Geistes_" ("Life is a disease of the spirit"). Why? Because only in living individuals does the world-spirit feel itself, attain to self-consciousness. And no less highly than disease does Novalis prize voluptuousness, sensual rapture. Why? Because it is simply an excited, and therefore in his eyes diseased, self-consciousness, a wavering struggle between pleasure and pain. "Could man," he says, "but begin to love sickness and suffering, he would perhaps in their arms experience the most delicious rapture, and feel the thrill of the highest positive pleasure.... Does not all that is best begin as illness? Half-illness is an evil; real illness is a pleasure, and one of the highest." And he writes elsewhere of a mystic power, "which seems to be the power of pleasure and pain, the enrapturing effect of which we observe so distinctly in the sensations of voluptuousness." To Novalis's voluptuous feeling of sickness corresponds the pietist's conviction of sin, that spiritual sickness