ABSTRACT
In 'Novalis's, first published in the Foreign Review, Thoams Carlyle tests out the possibility of such a future. Novalis was no 'mystic', he says, in the sense that he is impossible to understand. He lived and wrote in the spirit of Fichte and of 'Kantism, or German metaphysics generally', which sought to overthrow the empiricists' naive faith in the self-subsistence of matter. German metaphysics is no 'mere intellectual card-castle, or logical hocus-pocus', Carlyle insists, 'with no bearing on the practical interests of men'. Carlyle distances himself from these mixed consequences of German metaphysics under the figure of Novalis, who in this respect anticipates the fictional Teufelsdrockh of Sartor Resartus. Novalis represents the German effort to head off the relativism of the Understanding by positioning Reason's confident knowledge of the immaterial over against it. Carlyle simultaneously respects the visible world and finds it soulless.
