A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

Burke's early treatise on aesthetics, which separated the sublime from the beautiful and grounded both in human feeling. Part I argues that pain and danger, felt at a safe distance, produce a strong 'delight', and that this is the source of the sublime, the strongest emotion the mind can feel; beauty, by contrast, arises from the passions of society and love. Part II lists what produces the sublime: terror, obscurity, power, privations such as darkness and silence, vastness, infinity, difficulty, magnificence and sudden loud sound. Part III rejects the older views that beauty is proportion, fitness or perfection, and names its real causes: smallness, smoothness, gradual variation, delicacy and soft colour. Part IV offers physiological explanations, with the sublime tensing the nerves and beauty relaxing them. Part V argues that words move us less by forming clear images than by stirring feeling. The second edition added an introduction on taste.

It made the sublime a central idea of aesthetics and Romantic art, and it still helps explain why storms, ruins, horror and vast spaces attract us.