The World as Will and Idea, Vol. I — Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Haldane & Kemp

gain the upper hand, the peace of contemplation would become impossible, the impression of the sublime w(mld be lost, because it yields to the anxiety, in which the effort of the individual to right itself has sunk every other thought. A few examples will help very much to elucidate this theory of the msthetic sublime and remove all doubt with regard to it; at the same time they will bring out the different degrees of this sense of the sublime.

It is in the main identical with that of the beautiful, with pure will-less knowing, and the knowledge, that necessarily accompanies it of Ideas out of all relation determined by the principle of sufficient reason, and it is distinguished from the sense of the beautiful only by the additional quality that it rises above the known hostile relation of the object contemplated to the will in general.

Thus there come to be various degrees of the sublime, and transitions from the beautiful to the sublime, according as this additional quality is strong, bold, urgent, near, or weak, distant, and merely indicated.

I think it is more in keeping with tlie plan of my treatise, first to give examples of these transitions, and of the weaker degrees of the impression of the sublime, although persons whose sesthetical susceptibility in general is not very great, and whose imagination is not very lively, will only understand the examples given later of the higher and more distinct grades of that impression ; and they should therefore confine themselves to these, and pass over the examples of the very weak degrees of the sublime that are to be given first.

As man is at once impetuous and blind striving of will (whose pole or focus lies in the genital organs), ami eternal, free, serene subject of pure knowing (whose pole is the brain) ; so, corresponding to this antithesis, the sun is both the source of light, the condition of the most perfect kind of knowledge, and therefore of the most delightful of things — and the source of warmth, the first condition of life, i.e., of all phenomena of will in its higher grades.

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Therefore, what warmth is for the will, light is for knowledge^ Light is the largest gemTin the crown ~of beauty, and has the most marked influence on the knowledge of every beautiful object Its presence is an indispen^]}!? condition of b^utyj'^^its favourable ^sposition increases the beauty of the most beautiful.

Architectural beauty more than any other object is enhanced by favourable light, though even the most insignificant things become through its influence most bea,utiful.

If, in the dead of winter, when all nature is frozen and stiff, we see the rays of the setting sun reflected by masses of stone, illuminating without warming, and thus favourable only to the purest kind of knowledge, not to the will ; the contemplation of the beautiful effect of the light upon t'Kese~"masses KEs us, as does all* beauty, into a state of pure ' knowing.

But, in this case, a certain transcending brthelhtefests of the will is needed to enable us to rise into the state of pure knowing, because there is a iamt fecoIIecHbn of the lack of warmth from these rays, that is, an absence of the principle of life ; there is a slight challenge to persist in pure knowing, and to refrain from aU willing, and therefore it is an example of a transition from the sense of the beautlTul to that of the sublime.

It is the faintest trace of the sublime in the beautiful ; and beauty itself is indeed present only in a slight degree. The following is almost as weak an example.