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

The impression of the sublime may be prodvced in quite another way, by presenting a mere immensity in space and time ; its immeasurable greatness dwindles the individual to nothing. Adhering to Kant’s nomenclature and his accurate division, we may call the first kind the dynamical, and the second the mathematical sublime, although we entirely dissent from his explanation of the inner nature of the impression, and can allow no share a66

THE WORLD IDEA.

BK. 111.

in it either to moral reflections, or to hypostases from scholastic philosophy.

If we lose ourselves in the contemplation of the infimte~gf^tness” of the universe in space and time, meditate ^nTthe thousands of yearsjbhat are past or to come, dr if the heavens at night actually bring before our eyes innumerable worlds and so force upon our consciousness the immensity of the universe, we feel ourselves dwindle to nothing; as individuals, as living bodies, as transient phenomena of will, we feel ourselves pass away and vanish jnto nothing like drops in the ocean.

But at once there rises against this ghost of our own nothingness, against such lying impossibility, the immediate consciousness that all these worlds exist only as our idea, only as modifications of the eternal su^^t of pure knowing, which we find ourselves to be as soon as we forget our individuality, and which is the necessary supporter of all worlds and all times the condition of their possibility.

The vastness of the world which disquieted us before, rests now in us ; our dependence upon it is annulled by its dependence upon us. All this, however, does not come at once into reflection, but shows itself merely as the felt consciousness that in some sense or other (which philosophy alone can explain) we are one with the world, and therefore not ©i^fesied', hut exalted by its immensify!

It Ts"~the felt consciousness of this that the Upanishads of the Vedas repeatedly express in such a multitude of different ways ; very admirably in the saying already quoted : lice omnes cHaturce in totum ego sum, et •prceter me aliud ens non est (Oupnek’hat, vol. i. p. 122.) It is the transcending of our own individuality, the sense of the sublime.

" We receive this impression of the mathematical-sublime, quite directly, by means of a space which is small indeed as compared with the world, but which has become directly perceptible to us, and affects us with its whole extent in all its three dimensions, so as to make our ownp. 267 body seem almost infinitely small. An empty space can never be thus perceived, and therefore never an open space, but only space that is directly perceptible in all its dimensions by means of the limits which enclose it; thus for example a very high, vast dome, like that of St. Peter’s at Borne, or St. Paul’s in Londori. The sense of the sublime here arises through the consciousness of the vanishing nothingness of our own body in the presence of a vastness which, from another point of view, itself exists only in our idea, and of which we are as knowing subject, the supporter. Thus here as everywhere it arises from the contrast between the insignificance and dependence of ourselves as individuals, as phenomena of will, and the consciousness of ourselves as pure subject of knowing. Ev^ the vault of the sten-y heaven produces this if it is contemplated without reflection ; but just in the same way as the vault of stone, and only by its apparent, not its real extent. Some objects of our perception excite in us the feeling of the sublime because, not only on account of their spatial vastness, but also of their great age, tliat is, their temporal duration, we feel ourselves dwarfed to insignificance in their presence, and yet revel in the pleasure of contemplating them : of this kind are very high mountains, the Egyptian pyramids, and colossal rums of great antiq^uity.