Page:Novalis Schriften - Volume 2.djvu/154

★ 144 ★ sense, is in principle no different than monarchy, only that here the monarch is a mass of heads. True democracy is Protestantism—the political natural state, in the way that Protestantism in a narrower sense is a religious natural state.

The moderate kind of reformation is half nation and half natural state. it is an artificial, very fragile machine, to which all of the brightest minds are opposed, but it is the hobbyhorse of our time. This machine would let itself be transformed into a living, autonomous being, which would solve its major problem. The caprice of nature and the compulsion to art would permeate one another when one dissolves them in the spirit. The spirit makes both of them fluid. The spirit is at all times poetic. The poetic nation is the genuine, complete nation.

A nation very full of spirit will be poetic of itself. The more spirit and spiritual relationships there are in a nation, all the more it will be drawn closer to the poetic, all the more joyous everyone will become through the love of beauty, the great individuo, willing to limit his claims and to make the necessary sacrifices, all the less the nation requires it, all the more similar will the spirit of the state be to the spirit of a unique ideal people, who have proclaimed a single law forever: Be as good and poetic as possible.

138. The true reader must be the amplification of the author. He is the greater authority, who has already worked out the issue from the lesser authority in advance. The feeling through which the author has dissolved the materials of his writing, is again separated into the coarse and the refined when reading a book, and when the reader of the book would work through the book according to his idea, so the a second reader would refine it even more,