ABSTRACT
In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) Edmund Burke, attempting to define the experience of the sublime, spoke of an experience of a power that exceeds the quantifiable and the usable. Encounters with such a power, he observed, are characterized by pain and terror rather than by pleasure and love. For sublime power so transcends the bounds of the finite and the mortal that the individual has the sense of being threatened with obliteration when encountering it. Experience of the sublime is thus marked by a terrifying thrill rather than by pleasurable affection:
I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power. And this . . . rises . . . from terror, the common stock of every thing that is sublime. . . . pleasure follows the will; and therefore we are generally affected with it by many things of a force greatly inferior to our own. But pain is always inflicted by a power in some way superior, because we never submit to pain willingly. So that strength, violence, pain and terror, are ideas that
rush in upon the mind together. . . . Whenever strength is only useful, and
employed for our benefit or our pleasure, then it is never sublime; for
nothing can act agreeably to us, that does not act in conformity to our will;
but to act agreeably to our will, it must be subject to us; and therefore can
never be the cause of a grand and commanding conception.
