Novalis examining a crystal at his worktable

One shape among countless possibilities

Novalis (1772–1801), the German poet who was born Friedrich von Hardenberg, asks a question in his notes on physiology which might equally occur to someone looking at a crystal. How did this particular body come to have this shape? For a moment two things can be held in mind together, the definite outline in front of us and the many other bodies that the same material might have yielded.

What a substance can become

In the section on basic form, Novalis distinguishes several ways in which things grow. A body can increase in volume. Its interior can also acquire divisions and connections that barely register on its surface. Against that background his comparison with a human being takes on a particular force. The eye can follow a person's outline, yet the outline gives little idea of the possibilities with which that person began.

A human being is, as it were, one crystal of the substance from which endlessly many crystals could have formed.

– Novalis, Fragmente I, 1929, Fragments of a medical encyclopaedia, Physiology, Basic form.[1]

Looking into a single crystal

The following sentence changes the scale. Novalis imagines that the fully formed crystal might itself consist of countless smaller crystals resembling it. Until now, multiplicity has belonged to all the shapes that could have emerged from one substance. Suddenly there is room for it inside the particular shape that actually emerged.

The comparison suggests an attentive way of looking at a person. One can take seriously the features that have come to distinguish someone while remembering how many other outcomes were once possible. The quiet qualification “as it were” leaves the reader free to follow that thought.