Lord Karnes has a chapter in his Elements of Criticism,' on the sublime. Ile says, beautiful objedt placed high, appearing more agreeable than formerly, produces in the spectator a new emotion, termed the emotion of sublimity ; and every other emotion resembling this emotion of elevation, is called by the same name." lie has here the mere etymological notion of sublimity as something elevated, (See Dr. Parr's observations on the derivation of sublime from supra limum, in the Appendix to Dugald Stewart's Philos. Essays.') That there is little to be learnt from such an inquiry Is evident.
Mr. Payne Knight, in hie' Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste,' puts forth the theory that the sublime is the effect of the influ ence of mental energy exciting a sympathetic energy in the mind of the spectator or reader. The objections to this are the same as those to 13urke'e theory, namely, that it embraces a portion of the truth, which it would substitute for the whole truth. We have only to reflect an instant, and numberless instances of the sublime arise in which no mental energy is implied. Solitude, for example, is certainly sublime ; so are infinity, eternity, Mont Blanc, &e. Mental energy is perhaps a more comprehensive formula for sublimity than terror, but it is still incomplete; and if one instance of sublimity can be quoted which does not contain the element asserted to be its 'ruling principle,' it is obvious that the theory must be erroneous.
Dugald Stewart's Essay on the Sublime' is entirely philological, and as such alone worthy of attention.
Dr. Thomas Brown combats the notion of a universal sublime, but avoids the real question altogether. All that is positive in his lecture on the subject is that the sublime and beautiful are not two distinct classes of emotions, but the same class, differing only in degree. " ht is," says he, "as in the thermometric scale, by adding one portion of caloric after another, we arise at last, after no very long progress, from the cold of freezing to the heat at which water boils; though our feel ings at these two points are as different as if they had arisen from causes that had no resemblance I certainly as different as our emotions of sublimity and beauty." (' Lectures on Philos. of Mind,' lvii.) Nothing can well be more erroucous than to take an analogy as a proof. Misled by his analogy, Dr. Brown has falsified the whole nature of the sublime, which, according to him, is but a larger or intense!. form of
the beautiful, whereas it differs essentially and antagonistically. lie takes the instance of a stream gently gliding through fields rich with all the luxuriance of summer, overshadowed at times by the foliage that hangs over it from bank to bank. This is beautiful. He then traces it on to a majestic river, which flows on and deposits itself in the ocean. Here it becomes sublime. And this sublimity he thinks merely the last in the progressive series of emotions, as the boiling point is the last in the progressive series of ascending heat. " If we were to contemplate this continued progress, we should have a series of emotions which might at each moment be similar to the preceding emotion, but which would become at last so different from our earliest feelings that we should scarcely think of them as feelings of one class." (Ibid.) The answer to this is, that upon a similar principle of analogical reasoning, you might trace the " progressive aeries" of feelings which the man underwent from his earliest childhood ; and when this series had conducted him to the gallows, you might say that his feelings at that moment were so different from his earliest feelings, that we should scarcely think of them as feelings of one class. Probably not. Nor should we, in our ethical philosophy, class the crimes which brought him to the gallows, with the iunocenee which commenced the " pro gressive series " of his emotions.
The whole of Dr. Brown's lecture on this subject is trivial or con fused ; and because he is unable to analyse the feeling itself, he boldly pronounces it not to be analysed. " It is the vain attempt to define what cannot be defined," he says," that has led to all the errors and supposed mysteries in the theory of sublimity. Sublimity is not one emotion, but various emotions, that have a certain resemblance—the sublime in itself is nothing ; or at least it is only a mere name, indica tive of our feeling of the resemblance of certain affections of our mind, excited by objects material or mental, that agree perhaps in no other circumstance, but in that analogous undefinable emotion which they excite." We maintain, on the contrary, that sublimity is one emotion, not various similar emotions. It is Itself complex, made up of various feelings ; but it is one specific feeling, which preserves its characteristic throughout the various shades of difference in the objects which excite it.