[6] A word may be added here on a disputed point as to ‘spiritual’ sublimity. It has been held that intellect cannot be sublime; but surely in the teeth of facts. Not to speak of intellect as it appears in the sphere of practice, how can it be denied that the intellect of Aristotle or Shakespeare or Newton may produce the impression of sublimity? All that is true is, first, that the intellect must be apprehended imaginatively and not thought abstractly (otherwise it can produce no aesthetic impression), and, secondly, that it appears sublime in virtue not of its quality alone but of the quantity, or force, of that quality.
[7] The same principle applies to other cases. If, for example, the desolation of a landscape is felt to be sublime, it is so not as the mere negation of life, verdure, etc., but as their active negation.
[8] The reader will remember that in one sense of the question, Is there no more in the sublime than overwhelming greatness? this question must of course be answered in the affirmative. Sublimity is a mode of beauty: the sublime is not the overwhelmingly great, it is the beautiful which has overwhelming greatness; and it affects us through its whole nature, not by mere greatness.
[9] I am warning the reader against a mistake which may arise from the complexity of aesthetic experience. We may make a broad distinction between ‘glad’ and ‘sad’ modes of beauty; but that does not coincide with the distinction of modes with which we are concerned in this lecture. What is lovely or ‘beautiful’ may be glad or sad, and so may what is grand or sublime.
[10] In what follows I have spoken as if the two were always successive stages, and as if these always came in the same order. It is easier to make the matter quickly clear by taking this view, which also seemed to answer to my own experience. But I do not wish to commit myself to an opinion on the point, which is of minor importance. What is essential is to recognise the presence of the two ‘aspects’ or ‘stages,’ and to see that both are requisite to sublimity.
[11] ‘Ich fühlte mich so klein, so gross,’ says Faust, remembering the vision of the Erdgeist, whom he addresses as ‘Erhabener Geist.’ He was at once overwhelmed and uplifted.
[12] At least if the ‘Vision’ is sublime its sublimity is not that of the original. We can ‘discern the form thereof’ distinctly enough.
[13] To avoid complication I have passed by the case where we compare the sublime thing with another thing and find it much greater without finding it immeasurably great. Here the greatness, it appears to me, is still unmeasured. That is to say, we do not attempt to determine its amount, and if we did we should lose the impression of sublimity. We may say, perhaps, that it is ten, fifty, or a million times, as great; but these words no more represent mathematical calculations than Hamlet’s ‘forty thousand brothers.’
[14] I am far from being satisfied with the ideas imperfectly expressed in the first and third of these Notes, but they require more consideration than I can give to them during the printing of the Second Edition. The reader is requested to take them as mere suggestions.
[15] Hence a creature much less powerful than ourselves may, I suppose, be sublime, even from the mere point of view of vital energy. But I doubt if this is so in my own case. I have seen ‘magnificent’ or ‘glorious’ cocks and cats, but if I called them ‘sublime’ I should say rather more than I feel. I mention cocks, because Ruskin somewhere mentions a sublime cock; but I cannot find the passage, and this cock may have been sublime (if it really was so to Ruskin) from some other than ‘vital’ greatness.