o unity, but this unity stands out in opposition to the
manifold phenomena which it transcends, and rejects as unreal.

Now this destruction of nature, which the metaphysicians since
Parmenides have so often repeated (nature nevertheless surviving
still), is but a theoretical counterpart and hypostasis of what
happens in every man's conscience when the comprehensiveness of
his experience lifts him into thought, into abstraction. The sense of
the sublime is essentially mystical: it is the transcending of distinct
perception in favour of a feeling of unity and volume. So in the
moral sphere, we have the mutual cancelling of the passions in the
breast that includes them all, and their final subsidence beneath the
glance that comprehends them. This is the Epicurean approach to
detachment and perfection; it leads by systematic acceptance of
instinct to the same goal which the stoic and the ascetic reach by
systematic rejection of instinct. It is thus possible to be moved to
that self-enfranchisement which constitutes the sublime, even
when the object contains no expression of evil.

This conclusion supports that part of our definition of beauty
which declares that the values beauty contains are all positive; a
definition which we should have had to change if we had found
that the sublime depended upon the suggestion of evil for its effect.
But the sublime is not the ugly, as some descriptions of it might
lead us to suppose; it is the supremely, the intoxicatingly beautiful.
It is the pleasure of contemplation reaching such an intensity that it
begins to lose its objectivity, and to declare itself, what it always
fundamentally was, an inward passion of the soul. For while in the
beautiful we find the perfection of life by sinking into the object, in
the sublime we find a purer and more inalienable perfection by
defying the object altogether. The surprised enlargement of vision,
the sudden escape from our ordinary interests and the identification
of ourselves with something permanent and superhuman, something
much more abstract and inalienable than our changing personality,
all this carries us away from the blurred objects before us,
and raises us into a sort of ecstasy.

In the trite examples of the sublime, where we speak of the vast
mass, strength, and durability of objects, or of their sinister aspect,
as if we were moved by them on account of our own danger, we
seem to miss the point. For the suggestion of our own dang