clean, unclean!" said the holy
Prophet, when the Infinite Holiness stood before him. Could a more
terrible distance be measured, than by these fearful words, between
God and man?

If it be objected to this view, that many cases occur, having the same
conditions with those assumed in our general proposition, which are
yet exclusively painful, unmitigated even by a transient moment of
pleasure,--in Despair, for instance,--as who can limit it?--to this we
reply, that no emotion having its sole, or circle of existence in
the individual mind itself, can be to that mind other than a
_subject_. A man in despair, or under any mode of extreme
suffering of like nature, may, indeed, if all interfering sympathy
have been removed by time or after-description, be to _another_
a sublime object,--at least in one of those suggestive forms just
noticed; but not to _himself_. The source of the sublime--as all
along implied--is essentially _ab extra_. The human mind is not
its centre, nor can it be realized except by a contemplative act.

Besides, as a mental pleasure,--indeed the highest known,--to
be recognized as such, it must needs be accompanied by the same
_relative character_ by which is tested every other pleasure
coming under that denomination; namely, by the entire absence
of _self_, that is, by the same freedom from all personal
consideration which has been shown to characterize the true effect of
the Three leading Ideas already considered. But if to this also it be
further objected, that in certain particular cases, as of
personal danger,--from which the sublime emotion has often been
experienced,--some personal consideration must necessarily be
involved, as without a sense of security we could not enjoy it; we
answer, that, if it be meant only that the mind should be in such a
state as to enable us to receive an unembarrassed impression, it seems
to us superfluous,--an obvious truism placed in opposition to an
absurd impossibility. We needed not to be told, that no pleasurable
emotion is likely to occur while we are unmanned by fear. The same
might be said, also, in respect to the Beautiful: for who was ever
alive to it under a paroxysm of terror, or pain of any kind? A
terrified person is in any thing but a fit state for such emotion. He
may indeed _afterwards_, when his fear is passed off, contemplate
the circumstance that occasioned it with a different feeling; but the
object of his dismay is _then_ projected, as it were