 The romantics further argued that the attempt to ground the whole edifice of knowledge in the Absolute—familiar to them from Fichte’s project, which they both admired and harshly criticized—is futile. Like Kant, they believed that reason’s natural and necessary drive to proceed towards the unconditioned can never be fully realized. The unconditioned totality of experience is “a regulative idea” (Novalis, FS: #472): it cannot serve as a systematic grounding of experience. As Novalis memorably puts it: 