The Sublime and Beautiful

Burke begins with a section on the senses in relation to human individuality and society in order to illuminate the collective nature of passions—for which we may read emotions—and to argue that the power of the arts is to shape and effect those emotions. In the second part, Burke observes the passions caused by the sublime, including terror, as well as records the effects of certain sensory perceptions—of sound, light, color, and smell—on creating sublime feelings in the mind. Part three follows the same trajectory but describes the beautiful instead before ultimately comparing the two, and part four attempts to ascertain their causes in nature. Burke concludes his treatise with a brief section on the sublime and beautiful in poetry, laying the groundwork for Romanticism’s use of language, among other things, to purposefully invoke feeling in the reader or observer. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Edmund Burke’s is a classic of philosophy reimagined for modern readers.