 Like many other members of the generation which came intellectually of age in the 1790s—a group which includes not only the idealist philosophers Schelling and Hegel but also the poets Novalis and Hölderlin—Schlegel’s philosophical interests were framed around a concern for somehow uniting Fichtean freedom of the subject with Spinozistic holism. It is likely that Schlegel attended Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (Theory of Scientific Knowledge) “nova methodo” lectures in Jena starting in October 1796, and he was guided at least in part in his study of the new idealistic philosophy by Novalis, whose own Fichte Studies represent a fascinating window onto the effect that Fichte had on this generation. Novalis and Schlegel had a famous conversation about idealism in the summer of 1796, and both attempted to articulate an opposition to the reliance on a single first principle which they thought characterized the philosophical efforts of Reinhold and Fichte to set Kantian philosophy on a systematic basis. (This Romantic contribution to the anti-foundationalist Grundsatzkritik of the 1790’s has long been a neglected aspect of research on the development of German Idealism, as has the work of those philosophers—such as Immanuel Niethammer, Carl Immanuel Diez, Johann Benjamin Erhard and Friedrich Karl Forberg—who pursued a similar line of thought against Reinhold and Fichte.)