that I am not very positive.  A perpendicular 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 effect 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.

SECTION 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.

Whenever we repeat any idea frequently, the mind, by a sort of mechanism, repeats it long after the first cause has ceased to operate.[18] After 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 waters roar 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.[19] Place 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