The development of the concept of the sublime as an aesthetic quality in nature distinct from beauty was first brought into prominence in the eighteenth century in the writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, and John Dennis, in expressing an appreciation of the fearful and irregular forms of external nature, and Joseph Addison's synthesis of Cooper's and Dennis' concepts of the sublime in his The Spectator (1711), and later the Pleasures of the Imagination. Later the treatise was translated into English by John Pultney in 1680, Leonard Welsted in 1712, and William Smith in 1739 whose translation had its fifth edition in 1800. This treatise was rediscovered in the sixteenth century, and its subsequent impact on aesthetics is usually attributed to its translation into French by Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux in 1674 ( Traité du sublime. Longinus' treatise is also notable for referencing not just Greek writers such as Homer but also biblical sources such as Genesis. As such, the sublime inspires awe and veneration, with greater persuasive powers.
For Longinus, the sublime is an adjective that describes great, elevated, or lofty thought or language, particularly in the context of rhetoric. This is thought to have been written in the 1st century AD though its origin and authorship is uncertain. The first known study of the sublime is ascribed to Longinus: On the Sublime. Later writers tend to include the sublime in the beautiful. Both men distinguished the sublime from the beautiful. Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant both investigated the subject (compare Burke’s Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful, 1756, and Kant's Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, 1764). Prior to the eighteenth century sublime was a term of rhetoric predominantly relevant to literary criticism. For Longinus, artistic genius was the skill of metaphor. The first study of the value of the sublime is the treatise ascribed to Longinus: On the Sublime. This greatness is often used when referring to nature and its vastness. The term especially refers to a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation. In aesthetics, the sublime (from the Latin sublimis (under the lintel, high, exalted)) is the quality of transcendent greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical or artistic. "Choose a day on which to represent the most sublime and affecting tragedy we have appoint the most favorite actors spare no cost upon the scenes and decorations unite the greatest efforts of poetry, painting, and music and when you have collected your audience, just at the moment when their minds are erect with expectation, let it be reported that a state criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square in a moment the emptiness of the theatre would demonstrate the comparative weakness of the imitative arts."- A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) by Edmund Burke But the sight of them is the more attractive, the more fearful it is, provided only that we are in security and we readily call these objects sublime because they raise the energies of the soul above their accustomed height, and discover in us a faculty of resistance of a quite different kind, which gives us courage to measure ourselves against the apparent almightiness of nature."- Critique of Judgment (1790) by Immanuel Kant, tr. "Bold, overhanging, and as it were threatening, rocks clouds piled up in the sky, moving with lightning flashes and thunder peals volcanoes in all their violence of destruction hurricanes with their track of devastation the boundless ocean in a state of tumult the lofty waterfall of a mighty river, and such like these exhibit our faculty of resistance as insignificantly small in comparison with their might. When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience." - A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke
"Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the idea of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.
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