with
the progress of culture.

All activity ceases when knowledge comes. The state of knowing is
_eudaemonism_, blest repose of contemplation, heavenly quietism.

Miracles, as contradictions of Nature, are _amathematical_. But there
are no miracles in this sense. What we so term, is intelligible
precisely by means of mathematics; for nothing is miraculous to
mathematics.

In music, mathematics appears formally, as revelation, as creative
idealism. All enjoyment is musical, consequently mathematical. The
highest life is mathematics.

There may be mathematicians of the first magnitude who cannot cipher.
One can be a great cipherer without a conception of mathematics.

Instinct is genius in Paradise, before the period of self-abstraction
(self-recognition).

The fate which oppresses us is the sluggishness of our spirit. By
enlargement and cultivation of our activity, we change ourselves into
fate. Everything appears to stream in upon us, because we do not
stream out. We are negative, because we choose to be so; the more
positive we become, the more negative will the world around us be,
until, at last, there is no more negative, and we are all in all. God
wills gods.

All power appears only in transition. Permanent power is stuff.

Every act of introversion--every glance into our interior--is at the
same time ascension, going up to heaven, a glance at the veritable
outward.

Only so far as a man is happily married to himself, is he fit for
married life and family life, generally.

One must never confess that one loves one's self. The secret of this
confession is the life-principle of the only true and eternal love.

We conceive God as personal, just as we conceive ourselves personal.
God is just as personal and as individual as we are; for what we call
I is not our true I, but only its off glance.

HYMN TO NIGHT (1800)

By NOVALIS

TRANSLATED BY PAUL B. THOMAS

Who, that hath life and the gift of perception, loves not more than
all the marvels seen far and wide in the space about him Light, the
all-gladdening, with its colors, with its beams and its waves, its
mild omnipresence as the arousing day? The giant world of restless
stars breathes it, as were it the innermost soul of life, and lightly
floats in its azure flood; the stone breathes it, sparkling and ever
at rest, and the dreamy, drinking plant, and the savage, ardent,
manifold-fashioned beast; but above all the glorious stranger with the