Wilhelm Heinse’s novel Ardinghello und die glückseligen Inseln (‘Ardinghell and the Blessed Islands’) (1787) is often rejected as an unsuitable object for literary criticism – it is seen as formally defective, overladen with theory and hardly comprehensible to the modern reader. Leonhard Herrmann demonstrates that it is these very qualities which make it worthy of consideration as the manifestation of a philosophical experiment – the sensual, empirical individual with free will. Although this experiment must ultimately fail, the novel continues to find enthusiastic readers in the 19th and 20th centuries.