History of Modern Philosophy eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 841 pages of information about History of Modern Philosophy.

History of Modern Philosophy eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 841 pages of information about History of Modern Philosophy.

Besides free and adherent beauty, there is still a third kind of aesthetic effect, the Sublime.  The beautiful pleases by its bounded form.  But also the boundless and formless can exert aesthetic effect:  that which is great beyond all comparison we judge sublime.  Now this magnitude is either extensive in space and time or intensive greatness of force or power; accordingly there are two forms of the sublime.  That phenomenon which mocks the power of comprehension possessed by the human imagination or surpasses every measure of our intuition, as the ocean and the starry heavens, is mathematically sublime.  That which overcomes all conceivable resistance, as the terrible forces of nature, conflagrations, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, thunderstorms, is dynamically sublime or mighty.  The former is relative to the cognitive, the latter to the appetitive faculty.  The beautiful brings the imagination and the understanding into accord; by the sublime the fancy is brought into a certain favorable relation, not directly to be termed harmony, with reason.  In the one case there arose a restful, positively pleasurable mood; here a shock is produced, an indirect and negative pleasure proceeding from pain.  Since the sublime exceeds the functional capability of our sensuous representations and does violence to the imagination, we first feel small at the sight of the absolutely great, and incapable of compassing it with our sensuous glance.  The sensibility is not equal to the impression; this at first seems contrary to purpose and violent.  This humiliating impression, however, is quickly followed by a reaction, and the vital forces, which were at first checked, are stimulated to the more lively activity.  Moreover, it is the sensuous part of man which is humbled and the spiritual part that is exalted:  the overthrow of sensibility becomes a triumph for reason.  The sight of the sublime, that is, awakens the Idea of the unconditioned, of the infinite.  This Idea can never be adequately presented by an intuition, but can be aroused only by the inadequacy of all that is sensuous to present it; the infinite is presented through the impossibility of presenting it.  We cannot intuit the infinite, but we can think it.  In comparison with reason (as the faculty of Ideas, the faculty of thinking the infinite) even the greatest thing that can be given in the sense-world appears small; reason is the absolutely great.  “That is sublime the mere ability to think which proves a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of sense.”  “That is sublime which pleases immediately through its opposition to the interest of the senses.”  The conflict between phantasy and reason, the insufficiency of the former for the attainment of the rational Idea, makes us conscious of the superiority of reason.  Just because we feel small as sensuous beings we feel great as rational beings.  The pleasure (related to the moral feeling of respect and, like this, mingled with a certain pain) which accompanies this consciousness

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History of Modern Philosophy from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.