‘The sciences must all be poeticised,’ Novalis wrote from Freiberg. Yes, shouted Friedrich Schlegel, yes, why not? He too would turn physics into music, Friedrich said: ‘what I really want is to make Euclid singable.’ A poet understood the world better than a scientific mind, the friends believed, because the language of science was too mechanical and atomistic. ‘Poetry’, Novalis insisted, ‘is true absolute reality.’[*5]
