 With its broken form and literary style, Novalis’s return to the fragment has been taken to challenge the distinction between art and critical thinking that was entirely central to Kant and Fichte. However, while the fragment draws on the expressive registers of literature, it does not represent a deconstruction of the difference between philosophy and poetry, science and art. It is, rather, an attempt, from within the realm of critical reason, to explore a reality whose complex nature cannot be captured by the work of a narrowly oriented rationality (Verstandesdenken, in the eighteenth-century glossary). Like Schelling and Hegel, Novalis challenges the dry and narrow understanding of reason that, in their view, had come to dominate the post-Enlightenment world of politics, science, and letters. Like them, he does this not by appealing to the purely irrational, but by developing a notion of reason that includes a dimension of historicity and takes into account the experience of art, literature, and religious and affective sentiments of various kinds. Unlike Schelling and Hegel, however, Novalis believes that such a notion of reason can only be obtained by leaving behind the idea of a final and all-encompassing philosophical system. But as Herder had been demonstrating already in the early 1770s, to question the idea of an all-encompassing system is not the same as to endorse intellectual chaos or unsystematic thought procedures. When reading the early romantic philosophy of Novalis, one should keep in mind the warning of his friend Friedrich Schlegel: Just as a fully systematic philosophy might be an illusion, a completely unsystematic philosophy would instantly kill off every intellectual ambition. Thus the challenge of romantic philosophy consists in the attempt to think systematically but without allowing thought to stagnate in a final set of truths or dogma. Philosophy ought to be open-ended; it should develop in close interaction with the natural sciences as well as the humanities. In short, philosophy should take the shape of a sustained intellectual experiment; it should be forever on its way and thoroughly inductively minded. This philosophical credo runs through the entire work of Novalis, from Miscellaneous Observations to Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia (Das Allgemeine Brouillon) and Christianity or Europe.