Ye subterraneous gods,whose awful sway The gliding ghosts and silent shades obey;O Chaos hoar!and Phlegethon profound!Whose solemn empire stretches wide around;Give me,ye great,tremendous powers,to tell Of scenes and wonders in the depth of hell:Give me your mighty secrets to display From those black realms of darkness to the day.-Pitt Obscure they went through dreary shades that led Along the waste dominions of the dead.-Dryden.
VII
Vastness [Footnote 1:Part IV.sect.9.]
Greatness1of dimension is a powerful cause of the sublime.This is too evident,and the observation too common,to need any illustration:it is not so common to consider in what ways greatness of dimension,vastness of extent or quantity,has the most striking effect.For certainly,there are ways and modes,wherein the same quantity of extension shall produce greater effects than it is found to do in others.Extension is either in length,height,or depth.
Of these the length strikes least;an hundred yards of even ground will never work such an effect as a tower an hundred yards high,or a rock or mountain of that altitude.I am apt to imagine likewise,that height is less grand than depth;and that we are more struck at looking down from a precipice,than looking up at an object of equal height;but of that I am not very positive.Aperpendicular has more force in forming the sublime,than an inclined plane;and the effects of a rugged and broken surface seem stronger than where it is smooth and polished.It would carry us out of our way to enter in this place into the cause of these appearances;but certain it is they afford a large and fruitful field of speculation.However,it may not be amiss to add to these remarks upon magnitude,that,as the great extreme of dimension is sublime,so the last extreme of littleness is in some measure sublime likewise:
when we attend to the infinite divisibility of matter,when we pursue animal life into these excessively small,and yet organized beings,that escape the nicest inquisition of the sense;when we push our discoveries yet downward,and consider those creatures so many degrees yet smaller,and the still diminishing scale of existence,in tracing which the imagination is lost as well as the sense;we become amazed and confounded at the wonders of minuteness;nor can we distinguish in its effects this extreme of littleness from the vast itself.For division must be infinite as well as addition;because the idea of a perfect unity can no more be arrived at,than that of a complete whole,to which nothing may be added.
VIII
Infinity Another source of the sublime is infinity;if it does not rather belong to the last.
Infinity has a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror,which is the most genuine effect and truest test of the sublime.There are scarce any things which can become the objects of our senses,that are really and in their own nature infinite.But the eye not being able to perceive the bounds of many things,they seem to be infinite,and they produce the same effects as if they were really so.We are deceived in the like manner,if the parts of some large object are so continued to any indefinite number,that the imagination meets no check which may hinder its extending them at pleasure.
[Footnote 1:Part IV.sect.12.]
[Footnote 2:Part IV.sect.14.]
Whenever we repeat any idea frequently,the mind,by a sort of mechanism,repeats it long after the first cause has ceased to operate.1After whirling about,when we sit down,the objects about us still seem to whirl.
After a long succession of noises,as the fall of waters,or the beating of forge-hammers,the hammers beat and the water roars in the imagination long after the first sounds have ceased to affect it;and they die away at last by gradations which are scarcely perceptible.If you hold up a straight pole,with your eye to one end,it will seem extended to a length almost incredible.2Place a number of uniform and equi-distant marks on this pole,they will cause the same deception,and seem multiplied without end.The senses,strongly affected in some one manner,cannot quickly change their tenor,or adapt themselves to other things;but they continue in their old channel until the strength of the first mover decays.This is the reason of an appearance very frequent in madmen;that they remain whole days and nights,sometimes whole years,in the constant repetition of some remark,some complaint,or song;which having struck powerfully on their disordered imagination in the beginning of their phrensy,every repetition reinforces it with new strength;and the hurry of their spirits,unrestrained by the curb of reason,continues it to the end of their lives.
