Sublime (philosophy)

"In the Old Testament stories... the sublime influence of God here reaches so deeply into the everyday that the two realms of the sublime and the everyday are not only actually unseparated but basically inseparable."

"I resolved, therefore, to bend my studies towards the Holy Scriptures, that I might see what they were. But behold, I espy something in them not revealed to the proud, not discovered unto children, humble in style, sublime in operation, and wholly veiled over in mysteries. ...such are thy Scriptures as grew up together with thy little ones. But I much disdained to be held a little one; and big swollen with pride, I took myself to be some great man."

"It frequently happens that where the second line is sublime, the third, in which he meant to rise still higher, is perfectly bombast."

"Without minute neatness of execution the sublime cannot exist. Grandeur of ideas is precision of ideas. Singular and particular detail is the foundation of the sublime."

"Hypocrisy, of course, delights in the most sublime speculations; for, never intending to go beyond speculation, it costs nothing to have it magnificent."

"That passage is what I call the sublime dashed to pieces by cutting too close with the fiery four-in-hand round the corner of nonsense."

"This tendency, however, to ascribe an universality of genius to great men, led Dryden to affirm, on the strength of two smart satyrical lines, that Virgil could have written a satire equal to Juvenal. But, with all due deference to Dryden, I conceive it much more manifest, that Juvenal could have written a better epic than Virgil, than that Virgil could have written a satire equal to Juvenal. Juvenal has many passages of the moral sublime far superior to any that can be found in Virgil, who, indeed, seldom attempts a higher flight than the sublime of description. Had Lucan lived, he might have rivalled them both, as he has all the vigour of the one, and time might have furnished him with the taste and elegance of the other."

"If I am not mistaken, the distinguishing character of Lucretius (I mean of his soul and genius) is a certain kind of noble pride, and positive assertion of his opinions. He is every where confident of his own reason, and assuming an absolute command, not only over his vulgar reader, but even his patron Memmius. For he is always bidding him attend, as if he had the rod over him, and using a magisterial authority, while he instructs him. [...] He seems to disdain all manner of replies, and is so confident of his cause, that he is beforehand with his antagonists; urging for them whatever he imagined they could say, and leaving them, as he supposes, without an objection for the future; all this too, with so much scorn and indignation, as if he were assured of the triumph, before he entered into the lists. From this sublime and daring genius of his, it must of necessity come to pass, that his thoughts must be masculine, full of argumentation, and that sufficiently warm. From the same fiery temper proceeds the loftiness of his expressions, and the perpetual torrent of his verse, where the barrenness of his subject does not too much constrain the quickness of his fancy. For there is no doubt to be made, but that he could have been every where as poetical, as he is in his descriptions, and in the moral part of his philosophy, if he had not aimed more to instruct, in his system of nature, than to delight."

"We may describe the Sublime thus: it is an object (of nature) the representation of which determines the mind to think the unattainability of nature regarded as a presentation of Ideas. ...That is, the sublime is that which overwhelms the rational capacities of the mind, temporarily freezing the mortal in awe and fear, before his apparatus reignites and grants a pleasurable overcoming of sensation by rational comprehension."

"The feeling of the sublime is . . . at once a feeling of displeasure, arising from the inadequacy of imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude to attain to its estimation by reason, and a simultaneously awakened pleasure, arising from this very judgment of the inadequacy of the greatest faculty of sense being in accord with ideas of reason, so far as the effort to attain to these is for us a law. It is, in other words, for us a law (of reason), which goes to make us what we are, that we should esteem as small in comparison with ideas of reason everything which for us is great in nature as an object of sense; and that which makes us alive to the feeling of this supersensible side of our being harmonizes with that law."

"[I]t is the duty of nations, as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord: And insomuch as we know that by his divine law nations, like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of the civil war which now desolates our land may be a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people? We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown; but we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us: It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness... I do by this proclamation designate and set apart Thursday, the 30th day of April, 1863, as a day of national humiliation, fasting, and prayer. ...All this being done in sincerity and truth, let us then rest humbly in the hope authorized by the divine teachings, that the united cry of the nation will be heard on high, and answered with blessings no less than the pardon of our national sins, and the restoration of our now divided and suffering country..."

"There are, one may say, some five most productive sources of the sublime in literature, the common groundwork, as it were, of all five being competence in speaking, without which nothing can be done. The first and most powerful is the power of grand conceptions... and the second is the inspiration of vehement emotion."

"Utterances which appear inspired are often not sublime but merely childish."

"The study of the Latin writers had never been wholly neglected in Italy. But Petrarch introduced a more profound, liberal, and elegant scholarship, had communicated to his countrymen that enthusiasm for the literature, the history, and the antiquities of Rome, which divided his own heart with a frigid mistress and a more frigid muse. Boccaccio turned their attention to the more sublime and graceful models of Greece."

"Generally the ridiculous touches the sublime."

"Sublime Lucretius' poetry will pass away Only when Earth has seen its final day."

"There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous."

"The sublime and ridiculous are often so nearly related that it is difficult to class them separately. One step below the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again."

"Intellect is to the people and the people's Force, what the slender needle of the compass is to the ship—its soul, always counselling the huge mass of wood and iron, and always pointing to the north. To attack the citadels built up on all sides against the human race by superstitions, despotisms, and prejudices, the Force must have a brain and a law. Then its deeds of daring produce permanent results, and there is real progress. Then there are sublime conquests. Thought is a force, and philosophy should be an energy, finding its aim and its effects in the amelioration of mankind. The two great motors are Truth and Love. When all these Forces are combined, and guided by the Intellect, and regulated by the RULE of Right, and Justice, and of combined and systematic movement and effort, the great revolution prepared for by the ages will begin to march. The POWER of the Deity Himself is in equilibrium with His WISDOM. Hence the only results are HARMONY."

"Man is not to be comprehended as a starting-point, or progress as a goal, without those two great forces, Faith and Love. Prayer is sublime."

"I have this moment finished the gospel of St. Edmund, which your enthusiastic encomium had given me additional curiosity to read. As to style, he, like Shakspeare, touches the double octave from the sublime to the bathos. In many passages he is divinely eloquent; in some his wit is clean and brilliant, and his quotations remarkably lucky. His argument, with few exceptions, in my opinion, unanswerable. His work, with all its faults, does him the highest honour as an author, as a statesman, and as a moralist. It will do infinite good in France if it were possible to get it read there; but what is of far greater moment to us, it will do infinite service to us at home, in shewing us the danger of metaphysical speculations, and warning us not to go a-whoring after new inventions."

"Thee, bold Longinus! all the Nine inspire, And bless their Critick with a Poet's Fire. An ardent Judge, who Zealous in his Trust, With Warmth gives Sentence, yet is always Just; Whose own Example strengthens all his Laws, And Is himself that great Sublime he draws."

"The History of Electricity is a field full of pleasing objects, according to all the genuine and universal principles of taste, deduced from a knowledge of human nature. Scenes like these, in which we see a gradual rise and progress in things, always exhibit a pleasing spectacle to the human mind. Nature, in all her delightful walks, abounds with such views, and they are in a more especial manner connected with every thing that relates to human life and happiness; things, in their own nature, the most interesting to us. Hence it is, that the power of association has annexed crouds of pleasing sensations to the contemplation of every object, in which this property is apparent. This pleasure, likewise, bears a considerable resemblance to that of the sublime, which is one of the most exquisite of all those that affect the human imagination. For an object in which we see a perpetual progress and improvement is, as it were, continually rising in its magnitude; and moreover, when we see an actual increase, in a long period of time past, we can not help forming an idea of an unlimited increase in futurity; which is a prospect really boundless, and sublime."

"The law of simplicity and naïvety holds good of all fine art; for it is quite possible to be at once simple and sublime. True brevity of expression consists in everywhere saying only what is worth saying, and in avoiding tedious detail about things which everyone can supply for himself. This involves correct discrimination between what is necessary and what is superfluous. A writer should never be brief at the expense of being clear..."

"I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled... poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean."

"For the sublime and the beautiful and the interesting, you don't have to look far away."

"Even the death of Friends will inspire us as much as their lives. They will leave consolation to the mourners, as the rich leave money to defray the expenses of their funerals, and their memories will be incrusted over with sublime and pleasing thoughts, as monuments of other men are overgrown with moss; for our Friends have no place in the graveyard."

"His pamphlet came out this day sennight, and is far superior to what was expected, even by his warmest admirers. I have read it twice; and though of three hundred and fifty pages, I wish I could repeat every page by heart. It is sublime, profound, and gay. The wit and satire are equally brilliant; and the whole is wise, though in some points he goes too far: yet in general there is far less want of judgement than could be expected from him. If it could be translated—which, from the wit and metaphors and allusions, is almost impossible—I should think it would be a classic book in all countries, except in present France. To their tribunes it speaks daggers; though, unlike them, it uses none."

"So, for Kant, direct access to the noumenal domain would deprive us of the very "spontaneity," which forms the kernel of transcendental freedom: it would turn us into lifeless automata, or, to put it in today’s terms, into "thinking machines." And is this not ultimately presented as achievable in the future of Singularity? The prospect of is not to be dismissed as yet another “ontic” scientific research project of no authentic philosophical interest, since it offers something effectively new and unheard-of that challenges our status of being-human: the prospect of the actual (empirical) overcoming of our finitude/sexuality/embeddedness-in-the-symbolic. Entering this other dimension of Singularity becomes a simple positive fact, not a matter of sublime inner experience. What does this mean, for the status of our subjectivity and for our self-experience? Can we imagine a form of self-awareness that would be at the level of self-less floating in the space of Singularity?"

"The "Fall" is the theological name for such an unconscious choice, and it designates the wound (of separation, of the constitutive loss) which characterizes our being-human as finite and sexed. Musk (and other proponents of Neuralink) wants to heal the wound literally: to fill in the gap, to have man united with god by way of making him god-like, i.e., by way of providing him with properties and capacities which we (till now) experienced as "divine." What makes this option properly traumatic is that it turns around the gap that separates our ordinary daily experience from sublime speculations about our proximity to god."

"The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that, far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force. Astonishment... is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence, and respect."

"We have continually about us animals of a strength that is considerable but not pernicious. Amongst these we never look for the sublime; it comes upon us in the gloomy forest, and in the howling wilderness, in the form of the lion the tiger, the panther, or rhinoceros. 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."

"Among colours such as are soft or cheerful (except perhaps a strong red...) are unfit to produce grand images. ...[T]he cloudy sky is more grand than the blue; and night more sublime and solemn than day. ...[I]n buildings, when the highest degree of the sublime is intended, the materials and ornaments ought neither to be white, nor green, nor yellow, nor blue, nor of a pale red, nor violet, nor spotted, but of sad and fuscous colours, as black, or brown, or deep purple... [T]his melancholy kind of greatness, though it be certainly the highest, ought not to be studied in all sorts of edifices, where yet grandeur must be studied: in such cases the sublimity must be drawn from the other sources; with a strict caution however, against anything light and riant; as nothing so effectually deadens the whole taste of the sublime."

"The eye is not the only organ of sensation by which a sublime passion may be produced. Sounds have a great power... Excessive loudness alone is sufficient to overpower the soul, to suspend its action, and to fill it with terror. The noise of vast cataracts, raging storms, thunder, or artillery, awakes a great and awful sensation in the mind, though we can observe no nicety or artifice in those sorts of music. The shouting of multitudes has a similar effect... the best-established tempers can scarcely forbear being borne down and joining in the common cry and common resolution of the crowd."

"Greatness of dimension is a powerful cause of the sublime."

"A perpendicular has more force in forming the sublime, than an inclined plane; and the effects of a rugged and broken surface seem stronger than when it is smooth and polished."

"[A]s the great extreme of dimension is sublime, so the last extreme of littleness is in the same measure sublime... when we attend to the infinite divisibility of matter, when we pursue animal life into these excessively small, and yet organized beings... when we push our discoveries yet downward... in tracing which the imagination is lost as well as the sense; we become amazed and confounded at the wonders of minuteness; nor can we distinguish in its effects this extreme of littleness from the vast itself. For division must be infinite as well as addition; because the idea of a perfect unity can no more be arrived at, than that of an complete whole, to which nothing can be added."

"Another source of the sublime is infinity... Infinity has a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect and truest test of the sublime. There are scarce any things which can become the objects of our senses, that are really... infinite. But the eye not being able to perceive the bounds... they seem... infinite, and they produce the same effects... We are deceived in the like manner, if the parts of some large object are so continued to any indefinite number, that the imagination meets no check... Whenever we repeat an idea frequently, the mind... repeats it long after the first cause has ceased... multiplied without end. ...This is the reason of an appearance very frequent in madmen; that they remain... in the constant repetition of some remark... complaint, or song... every repetition reinforces it with new strength... unrestrained by the curb of reason, continues... to the end of their lives."

"[S]ublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small..."

"If black and white blend, soften, and unite A thousand ways, are there no black and white? If the qualities of the sublime and beautiful are sometimes found united, does this prove that they are the same; does it prove that they are... allied; does it prove even that they are not opposite and contradictory? Black and white may soften, may blend, but they are not therefore the same. Nor, when they are softened and blended with each other, or with different colours, is the power of black as black, or of white as white, so strong..."

"The finer feeling, which we shall now consider, is chiefly of a twofold nature; the sentiment of the Sublime and of the Beautiful. The emotion of both is agreeable: but in a very different manner."

"Night is sublime, day is beautiful."

"The sublime moves or touches, the beautiful charms."

"The feeling of [the sublime] is sometimes accompanied with dread, or even melancholy, in some cases with tranquil admiration merely, and in others with a beauty spread over a sublime plan. The first I shall name the Dreadful or Terrific Sublime, the second the Noble, and the third the Magnificent."

"Deep solitude is sublime, but in a terrific manner."

"The sublime must be simple, the beautiful may be dressed and ornamented."

"A long duration is sublime. Is it of past time? it is noble; if it is foreseen in an immense futurity, it has in it something dreadful."

"Understanding is sublime, wit is beautiful."

"Boldness is at once great and sublime, artifice is little, but beautiful."

"Sublime properties inspire esteem, but beautiful ones love."