 Novalis’s philosophical readership, his critics and supporters alike, have paid a great deal of attention to his interpretation of Fichte. For Novalis’s generation, Fichte was seen as the true heir of Kant’s critical thinking. In the Athenaeum Fragments, Schlegel applauds Fichte’s move beyond the Kantian architecture of reason, and in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy Hegel, likewise, suggests that it was Fichte who provided the speculative unity that Kant’s system was lacking. By emphasizing the I’s absolute and immediate positing of itself, Fichte, it was claimed, suspended the self-imposed limitations of Kantian idealism. He thus succeeded in overcoming the dichotomies that had plagued Kant’s contemporary readers, including the dichotomies of reason and sensibility, spontaneity and receptivity, freedom and necessity. With Fichte, philosophy was grounded in one ultimate and unifying principle: that of the I’s positing of itself as absolute and free (that is, in the jargon of the period, of the I positing itself as absolutely self-positing).