 Among the nineteenth century historians it was Wilhelm Dilthey who, in his grand effort to rehabilitate late eighteenth-century German philosophy, was able to see through the myth of Novalis and call for a reassessment of his philosophical work. As is the case with Dilthey’s return to the young Hegel, his reading of Novalis emphasizes the humanistic drive of his thinking as well as his philosophy of art and nature, which gets reinterpreted, in Dilthey’s lexicon, as a budding philosophy of life. Dilthey, however, situates Novalis with Goethe and Hölderlin, and ends up, quite against his own intention, highlighting the aesthetic rather than critical-intellectual force of his philosophy.