ABSTRACT
From the year 1674, when Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux translated the treatise of Longinus on the Sublime, there began what might almost be called a cult of sublimity in France and England. Most writers before the turn of the century used the word ‘sublime’ with a critical indifference that signified little consideration of its meaning. Generally it was used with reference to points of style and in fact expressed a rhetorical rather than an aesthetic concept. The novelty of Shaftesbury’s approach to the sublime is that he connects it with the idea of infinity; a subject to which the disputes between Thomas Hobbes and the Platonists must have drawn his attention. The empirical philosophy, in making the idea of the infinite suspect, robbed poetry of one of its main sustaining forces. Shaftesbury’s attitude to nature springs from his philosophy of optimism in which everything in the natural order reveals the goodness of God and has its own beauty.
