 According to Novalis, the “academy ought to be a thoroughly philosophical institution—only one faculty—the whole establishment organized—to arouse and exercise the capacity to think [Denkkraft] in a purposive way” (MO #4, trans. modified). By emphasizing the need for independent thinking, Fichte endorsed Kant’s critical turn and his transformation of philosophy, pitched as a set of doctrines and principles, into philosophizing, pictured as a critical activity. Furthermore, Fichte had realized that philosophizing is a call of the self to the self (FS #567). Yet the self to which the philosophizing turns is not understood as an empty or merely formal capacity for self-positing. True idealism, Novalis claims, is not opposed to realism, but only to formalism. A proper account of the self, in its relation to itself, should consider the self’s development in and through history as well as its externalizing of itself in the encounter with other minds and nature.