VastnessGREATNESS [1] of dimension is a powerful cause of the sublime. This
is too evident, and the observation too common, to need any illustration:
it is not so common to consider in what ways greatness of dimension,
vastness of extent or quantity, has the most striking effect. For
certainly, there are ways and modes, wherein the same quantity of extension
shall
produce greater effects than it is found to do in others. Extension
is either in length, height, or depth. Of these the length strikes
least; an hundred yards of even ground will never work such an effect
as a tower an hundred yards high, or a rock or mountain of that altitude.
I am apt to imagine likewise, that height is less grand than depth;
and that we are more struck at looking down from a precipice, than
looking up at an object of equal height; but of that I am not very
positive. A perpendicular has more force in forming the sublime,
than an inclined plane; and the effects of a rugged and broken surface
seem
stronger than where it is smooth and polished. It would carry us
out of our way to enter in this place into the cause of these appearances;
but certain it is they afford a large and fruitful field of speculation.
However, it may not be amiss to add to these remarks upon magnitude,
that, as the great extreme of dimension is sublime, so the last extreme
of littleness is in some measure sublime likewise: when we attend
to
the infinite divisibility of matter, when we pursue animal life into
these excessively small, and yet organized beings, that escape the
nicest inquisition of the sense; when we push our discoveries yet
downward, and consider those creatures so many degrees yet smaller,
and the still
diminishing scale of existence, in tracing which the imagination
is
lost as well as the sense; we become amazed and confounded at the
wonders of minuteness; nor can we distinguish in its effects this
extreme of
littleness from the vast itself. For division must be infinite as
well as addition; because the idea of a perfect unity can no more
be arrived
at, than that of a complete whole, to which nothing may be added.
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