Novalis pseudonym of Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), German poet and philosopher of early German Romanticism. His starting point was Fichte’s reflective type of transcendental philosophy; he attempted to complement Fichte’s focus on philosophical speculation by including other forms of intellectual experience such as faith, love, poetry, and religion, and exhibit their equally autonomous status of existence. Of special importance in this regard is his analysis of the imagination in contrast to reason, of the poetic power in distinction from the reasonable faculties. Novalis insists on a complementary interaction between these two spheres, on a union of philosophy and poetry. Another important aspect of his speculation concerns the relation between the inner and the outer world, subject and object, the human being and nature. Novalis attempted to reveal the correspondence, even unity between these two realms and to present the world as a ‘universal trope’ or a ‘symbolic image’ of the human mind and vice versa. He expressed his philosophical thought mostly in fragments. See also FICHTE. E.Beh.