timony to this effect, but Nietzsche's point of view, in its turn, rests on
an unbroken line of tradition extending back to the threshold of the
nineteenth century and beyond it. To an extent it derives authority even
from Goethe. Readers of " Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre" ( 1795-6) may
remember that the sixth book, containing the Confessions of a Beautiful
Soul, opens with a paragraph that squarely credits disease with effecting
the spiritual awakening of the purported writer of these confessions:

Till my eighth year, I was always a healthy child; but of that period I can
recollect no more than of the day when I was bom. About the beginning
of my eighth year, I was seized with a hemorrhage; and from that moment
my soul became all feeling, all memory. The smallest circumstances of
that accident are yet before my eyes, as if they had occurred but yesterday.

Ten years after the publication of that subtle piece of introspective au-
tobiography the first brief account of the life of Novalis appeared, and it
also attributes his extraordinary mental alertness to a severe illness that
occurred in his ninth year. Whether this report be based on truth or
legend, Novalis himself, at any rate, found disease a fascinating topic for
speculation. "Could disease not be a means of higher synthesis?", he asks
in one of his diary jottings, written about the dawn of the century, adding:
"The more agonizing the pain, the higher the pleasure that lurks within
it." In another passage he writes: "Illness is to be numbered among human
pleasures along with death." Still again he remarks:

Illnesses are certainly a most highly important factor of human life, since
there are such numberless varieties of them and every human being has
to cope with them such a lot. To date we are very imperfectly acquainted
with the art of using them. Probably they are the most interesting stimulus
and object of our meditation and our activity.

And there is, finally, the following passage, significant for its blending
of scientific intuition and religious mysticism:

All diseases resemble sin in the fact that they are transcendencies. All our
diseases are phenomena of a heightened sensitivity that is about to be
transformed into higher powers. When man wanted to become God, he
sinned....

About the same time when Novalis was engrossed with disease as
a theoretical problem, his most intimate friend, Friedrich Schlegel, gave
expression to similar views in the second of two letters that form a chapter
of his "romantic" novel " Lucinde" ( 1799). Schlegel tells there how a
disease that reduced him to the point of death turned out to be a spiritual

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