character.  For first, we must remember[15] that the idea of pain, in its highest degree, is much stronger than the highest degree of pleasure; and that it preserves the same superiority through all the subordinate gradations.  From hence it is, that where the chances for equal degrees of suffering or enjoyment are in any sort equal, the idea of the suffering must always be prevalent.  And indeed the ideas of pain, and, above all, of death, are so very affecting, that whilst we remain in the presence of whatever is supposed to have the power of inflicting either, it is impossible to be perfectly free from terror.  Again, we know by experience, that, for the enjoyment of pleasure, no great efforts of power are at all necessary; nay, we know that such efforts would go a great way towards destroying our satisfaction:  for pleasure must be stolen, and not forced upon us; pleasure follows the will; and therefore we are generally affected with it by many things of a force greatly inferior to our own.  But pain is always inflicted by a power in some way superior, because we never submit to pain willingly.  So that strength, violence, pain, and terror, are ideas that rush in upon the mind together.  Look at a man, or any other animal of prodigious strength, and what is your idea before reflection?  Is it that this strength will be subservient to you, to your ease, to your pleasure, to your interest in any sense?  No; the emotion you feel is, lest this enormous strength should be employed to the purposes of[16] rapine and destruction.  That power derives all its sublimity from the terror with which it is generally accompanied, will appear evidently from its effect in the very few cases, in which it may be possible to strip a considerable degree of strength of its ability to hurt.  When you do this, you spoil it of everything sublime, and it immediately becomes contemptible.  An ox is a creature of vast strength; but he is an innocent creature, extremely serviceable, and not at all dangerous; for which reason the idea of an ox is by no means grand.  A bull is strong too; but his strength is of another kind; often very destructive, seldom (at least amongst us) of any use in our business; the idea of a bull is therefore great, and it has frequently a place in sublime descriptions, and elevating comparisons.  Let us look at another strong animal, in the two distinct lights in which we may consider him.  The horse in the light of an useful beast, fit for the plough, the road, the draft; in every social useful light, the horse has nothing sublime; but is it thus that we are affected with him, whose neck is clothed with thunder, the glory of whose nostrils is terrible, who swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage, neither believeth that it is the sound of the trumpet?  In this description, the useful character of the horse entirely disappears, and the terrible and sublime blaze out together.  We have continually about us animals of a strength that is considerable, but not pernicious.