SUBLIME, The, that which, in the works of nature or of art, is grand and awe-inspiring, Longinus, the eminent philosophical critic (3d century), in his work (Peri Hypsils,' 'Of Sub limity.) characterizes the sublime in literary composition as that which "fills the reader with a glorying, and sense of inward greatness°; but he does not inquire into the nature of the sublime in general. Burke finds the essence of the sublime to consist in terror, acting whether openly or latently. Blair sees the cause of the feeling of pleasurable elation excited by the sublime, a mighty power or force; Kaimes in height or elevation; according to Sir William Hamilton the emotion produced by the sublime is a mingled feeling of pleasure and pain— pleasure in the consciousness of strong energy, and pain in the consciousness that this energy is vain. He distinguishes three phases of the sublime, the sublime of extension or space, of intension or power, and of protension or power, and cites the following passages from Kant as admirably illustrating the sublime in each of these three forms: "Two things there are, which, the oftener and the more steadily we consider them, fill the mind with an ever new, an ever rising admiration'and reverence the Starry Heaves above, the Moral Law within. Of neither am I compelled to seek out the reality, as veiled in darkness, or only to con jecture the possibility, as beyond the hemisphere of my knowledge. Both, I contemplate, lying clear before me. and .bot'bt both immediately with my consciousness of existence. The one departs from the place I occupy in the outer world of sense; expands beyond the bounds of imagination this connection of my body with worlds lying beyond worlds, and syitenis blending ieto systems; and protends it into the illimitable times of their periodical movements — to its commencement and continuance. The other departs from
my invisible self from my personality, and represents me in a world, truly infinite indeed, but whose infinity can be tracked out only by the intellect, with which also my connection. unlike the fortuitous relation I stand in to all worlds of sense I ant compelled to recognise as universal and necessary. In the former, the view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal product, which, after a brief and that incomprehensible endowment with the power of life, is compelled to refund its constituent matter to the planet — itself an atom in the universe — on which it grew. The aspect of the other, on the contrary. elevates my worth as an intelligence even without limit; and this through my personality, in which the moral law reveals a faculty of life independent of my animal nature. nay, of the whole material world; at least, if it be permitted to infer as much from the regulation of my being, which a conformity with that law exacts; proposing as it does, my moral worth for the absolute end of my activity, conceding no compromise of its imperative to a necessitation of nature, and spurning in its infinity, the conditions and boundaries of my present transitory life." See