SUBLIME. Objects indicating great power, vast expanse, or lofty elevation, excite in the beholder a feeling of pleasurable elation; and the name "sublime" is applied both to the objects and to the feeling.
The precise quality in things that arouse this mode of pleasurable excitement has been variously assigned. According to Burke, terror is, in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or more latently the ruling principle, or, at all events, one of the chief sources of sublimity: Blair suggested that mighty power or force is the cause; Payne Knight ascribed it to mental energy; Kaimes considers it due to height or elevation; Du gald Stewart, in an elaborate essay, affirms that elevation is the leading characteristic, and that expanse and power are sublime by suggesting or implying great height; sir W. Hamilton says that sublimity requires magnitude as its condition, and exists in three forms—space, time, and power.
The feeling itself has also been described variously. If this could be fixed, we should have a key to the objective quality. Longinus characterized it, in reference to literary composition, as "filling the reader with a glorying and a sense of inward greatness." Some would call it a "sense of security" in circumstances of terror or danger. Ham ilton describes it as " a mingled feeling of pleasure and pain—pleasure in the conscious ness of the strong energy, pain in the consciousness that this energy is vain." The con
nection with the sentiment of power is generally admitted; but as the comparison of the object with self suggests our own littleness at the same time, there may be a doubt as to whether the emotion is due to the power, to the littleness, onto the combination of both.
Referring to the generic sentiment of power, which is evidently at the foundation, we find that the feeling of superior might in ourselves is cheering, elating, stimulating; and that the sense of littleness or inferiority is a depressing and enfeebling state of mind, a state of pure pain, redeemable in certain circumstances by other feelings, as when our infe riority- is only in the comparison with an object of love or veneration, or when it is the condition of some compensating superiority—" the courtier stoops to rise." The pre sumption, therefore, is that the elation of the sublime is connected with the notion of power. It may be felt although the power is not actually possessed, but imagined, bor rowed, or conceived, through a sort of sympathy with the appearances of great power or might. If this account of the feeling be correct, power must be a principal quality in its objects; and if with this we combine voluminous sensation (and the corresponding ideas, vastness of expanse and greatness of time), we shall probably be able to explain the sublime in all its forms.