These explanations seem to me only partial. The true psychological reason lies in the natural extension of sympathy. We have elsewhere seen that it implies two principal conditions: an emotional temperament and a comprehensive power of representation. These conditions are most likely to be met with in a highly civilised generation, whose sensibilities are exceedingly acute and subtle, and their faculty of comprehension greatly extended.
The conquest of nature by intellect and emotion takes place through a process identical in both cases. There is an ascending movement of the intellect, which, by way of abstraction and generalisation, goes on to seek resemblances less and less obvious, and increasingly difficult to grasp. Certain races stop at the lowest stages: some ages never pass beyond a certain average of knowledge—e.g., the first centuries of the Middle Ages. In the same way, there is a progressive movement of feeling towards analogies in nature of ever greater tenuity, and the same remark applies to races and epochs.
It has been said that the pantheistic tendencies peculiar to certain peoples, such as those of India, are favourable to a more rapid development of the feeling for nature. This is, in fact, the thesis of sympathy under another form, since the assumed community of nature among all beings involves a community of feeling.
Let us note, in conclusion, that this extension of the æsthetic feeling to inanimate nature is produced by a process analogous to that which explains the genesis of benevolence. The pleasures and pains belong to us, but we attach them to the objects which occasion them; what we call the soul of things is our own soul projected outside ourselves and imparted to the things which have been associated with our feelings.
By a few facts, chosen out of a vast number at our disposal, I have tried to show that the æsthetic feeling has progressed by evolution from the social form to that of individualism, and from man to nature. This mode of objective exposition has seemed to me preferable, because it allows us to seize in a concrete and verifiable shape the law of its development and increase in complexity.
III.
It is usual to include under the same heading as the æsthetic sentiment two other emotions, that of the sublime and that of the comic, though I can only perceive a somewhat vague analogy and partial affinities between them. We shall attempt to see wherein these three states approximate to and differ from one another.
"The feeling of sublimity is that peculiar emotion which is excited by the presentation or ideal suggestion of vastness, whether in space or time (Kant’s ‘mathematical’ sublime), or physical or moral power (Kant’s ‘dynamical’ sublime)."[[218]] The distinction generally drawn between the mathematical and the dynamical sublime appears to me quite secondary, as the two cases reduce themselves to the idea of a force in action. Current opinion asserts that the emotion of the sublime is simpler than the æsthetic emotion properly so called. If we understand by this that the latter is richer in its development, much more complex, much more varied in aspect, comprehending the pretty, the graceful, the purely beautiful, the pathetic, etc., the opinion cannot be disputed; but if we mean that the sense of sublimity is simpler as regards its origin, we cannot admit it. I have already given the emotion of the sublime as an example of a binary combination (Part II., Chap. VII.) formed by synthesis of (a) a painful feeling of oppression, dejection, lowered vitality, reducible to one primary emotion—fear; (b) the consciousness of a rush, of violent energy in action, of a heightening of vitality, reducible to one primary emotion—the sense of personal power, “self-feeling” under its positive form. Moreover, one negative condition is necessary: the conscious or unconscious feeling of our security in the presence of some formidable power. Without this last all æsthetic feeling disappears.
The sentiment of the sublime loses the egoism which lies at its root by extending, through sympathy, to men and things. In participating, through the imagination, in the grandeur of a real or fictitious personage,—the Napoleon of history, the Moses of Michael Angelo, the Satan of Milton,—the ego is objectivised and alienated. It is the history of this development that we must now follow.
“Human might,” says Bain, “is the true and literal sublime, and the point of departure for the sublimity of other things.” This is, in fact, the starting-point. Grant Allen[[219]] has brilliantly illustrated this view, by trying to demonstrate that the feeling of the sublime has been evolved from a narrow anthropomorphism—the admiration for man’s physical strength—towards the sublimity of moral and intellectual qualities, and that of mass and time in nature. This conception deserves to be given in a condensed form, though it is somewhat of an outline, and not without lacunæ: neither is it certain, whatever this writer may say, that the terror with which man was inspired by natural phenomena did not show itself at a very early period, in a form approaching to the emotion of sublimity.