Despite several assertions to the contrary, Kleist had essentially an unphilosophic mind. He was penetrating and searching, of course, but childlike withal. Consider, for example, his fervent belief in the absolute validity of his rather naïve allegorical interpretations of nature, particularly the image of the vaulted arch which he describes in a letter to Wilhelmine. Or consider again the pedantic and amusing Fragen zu Denkübungen für Wilhelmine von Zenge. They might have been written by a precocious boy, and yet they were actually written in full seriousness by an extremely intelligent man, whose mind, in some respects, remained that of a child, poetic and unsophisticated. It remained absolute and exclusive in its judgments also, pursuing a premise to its last bitter conclusions. What the tension was in this uncompromising personality is generally recognized: in German its two poles are called Gefühl and Verstand. We may call them respectively, feeling and understanding, heart and head, intuitional knowledge and logical deduction, the spontaneous principle and the rational principle. These terms should be understood as simply and naively as Kleist explained the egocentric dilemma in his famous letter to Wilhelmine.