w into ourselves: there with
the supervening consciousness of safety or indifference comes a
rebound, and we have that emotion of detachment and liberation in
which the sublime really consists.

Thoughts and actions are properly sublime, and visible things only
by analogy and suggestion when they induce a certain moral
emotion; whereas beauty belongs properly to sensible things, and
can be predicated of moral facts only by a figure of rhetoric. What
we objectify in beauty is a sensation. What we objectify in the
sublime is an act. This act is necessarily pleasant, for if it were not
the sublime would be a bad quality and one we should rather never
encounter in the world. The glorious joy of self-assertion in the
face of an uncontrollable world is indeed so deep and entire, that it
furnishes just that transcendent element of worth for which we
were looking when we tried to understand how the expression of
pain could sometimes please. It can please, not in itself, but
because it is balanced and annulled by positive pleasures,
especially by this final and victorious one of detachment. If the
expression of evil seems necessary to the sublime, it is so only as a
condition of this moral reaction.

We are commonly too much engrossed in objects and too little
centred in ourselves and our inalienable will, to see the sublimity
of a pleasing prospect. We are then enticed and flattered,
and won over to a commerce with these external goods, and
the consummation of our happiness would lie in the perfect
comprehension and enjoyment of their nature. This is the office of
art and of love; and its partial fulfilment is seen in every perception
of beauty. But when we are checked in this sympathetic endeavour
after unity and comprehension; when we come upon a great evil or
an irreconcilable power, we are driven to seek our happiness by the
shorter and heroic road; then we recognize the hopeless
foreignness of what lies before us, and stiffen ourselves against it.
We thus for the first time reach the sense of our possible separation
from our world, and of our abstract stability; and with this comes
the sublime.

But although experience of evil is the commonest approach to this
attitude of mind, and we commonly become philosophers only
after despairing of instinctive happiness, yet there is nothing
impossible in the attainment of detachment by other channels. The
immense is sublime as well as the terrible; and mere infinity of the
obj