According to Tom Furniss, the central task of Burke’s Enquiry is to develop a set of theoretical principles to demonstrate that the sublime and the beautiful are extremely repugnant to each other. 1 In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it. The Sublime in essence then is a feeling of delightful awe caused by some terror, at least according to its most famous proponent, the Irish philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke. Edmund Burke (1729–1797). On the Sublime and Beautiful. The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. This idea leads to the conventional distinction between pleasure and pain. In nature, lofty mountains, raging seas and erupting volcanoes may all, when viewed under the right circumstances (not too close, but not too distant), be regarded as sublime. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) The Beautiful, according to Burke, is what is well-formed and aesthetically pleasing, whereas the Sublime is what has the power to compel and destroy us. For Burke, the sublime is associated with objects and events that, while threatening, are yet a source of ‘delight’. The beautiful, by contrast, brings a calmness over the person which produces the passion of love; it is small, delicate, and intimately familiar. Astonishment, then, according to Burke, is what causes something to become, to us, a sublime object which pushes everything else out of our consciousness. The theory of sublime art was put forward by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful published in 1757. 1909–14. He defined the sublime as an artistic effect productive of the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling. The sublime, according to Burke, is the manifestation of the passion of raw astonishment, frenzied ecstasy, and zeal; it is large, and oftentimes terrorizing. The Harvard Classics.