 Even though the fragment is expressive of the deeper—anti-teleological, if one likes—motivations of Novalis’s thinking, it is easy to make too much of the form in which substantial parts of his work is handed down to us. As is made clear by the publication of the critical edition, many of Novalis’s texts are available as fragments simply because he did not have the time to polish his thoughts or because they were never intended for publication. Furthermore, a text such as Pollen, which was indeed intended for publication, was edited by Friedrich Schlegel, who broke up some of the longer passages into shorter fragments.