 Schleiermacher’s theory also tends to downplay, obscure, or miss certain important points concerning interpretation that Friedrich Schlegel had already made. Schlegel’s treatment of hermeneutic matters—in texts such as his Philosophy of Philology (1797) and the Athenaeum Fragments (1798–1800)—largely resembles Schleiermacher’s. But it also includes the following four points which are either less emphatic, obscured, or altogether missing in Schleiermacher: (i) Schlegel notes that texts (at least superior ones) often express unconscious meanings in addition to their conscious ones: “Every excellent work … aims at more than it knows” (On Goethe’s Meister [1798] [PJ 2:177]). Schleiermacher sometimes seems to imply a similar view, most famously in his doctrine that the interpreter should aim to understand an author better than he understood himself. However, given Schleiermacher’s general skepticism about the unconscious, he probably means little more by this than that the interpreter should achieve an explicit knowledge of linguistic rules that the author himself only grasped implicitly. By contrast, Schlegel’s version of such a position is more radical, envisaging indeed an “infinite depth” of meaning that is largely unknown to the author himself. (ii) Schlegel emphasizes that a work sometimes expresses important meanings, not explicitly in any of its parts, but rather through the way in which these are put together to form a whole. This is a very important point. Schleiermacher perhaps in a way makes it as well, but if so, then only as incorporated into and obscured by his more dubious doctrine of the “seminal decision”. (iii) Unlike Schleiermacher, Schlegel emphasizes that works typically contain confusions that the interpreter needs not only to identify but also to explain: