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EDMUND BURKE

A PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY INTO THE ORIGIN OF OUR IDEAS OF THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL

1756

[This work was published when Burke was twenty-six years old, and had been begun when he was in his nineteenth year. The first four parts of the treatise deal with the nature of pleasure, of beauty, and of the sublime, with special reference to physical objects and their impressions on the senses; the fifth part, on language and literature, is reproduced here. The text is the revised form of the second edition (1757), to which Burke added a prefatory discourse on Taste, following out some of the matters taken up by Addison in his paper on the subject. While the psychology of the whole essay is now obsolete, it remains both intrinsically interesting and historically significant as one of the earliest English studies in the theory of æsthetics. In particular, the discussion in Part V of the comparative powers of language and the arts of form, influenced Lessing's treatment of the same subject in his Laocoon (1766).]

PART V

Section I. OF WORDS. Natural objects affect us, by the laws of that connection which Providence has established between certain motions and configurations of bodies, and certain consequent feelings in our mind. Painting affects in the same manner, but with the superadded pleasure of imitation. Architecture affects by the laws of nature and the law of reason; from which latter result the rules of proportion, which makes a work to be praised or censured, in the whole or in some part, when the end for which it was designed is or is not properly answered. But as to words, they seem to me to affect us in a manner very different from that in which we are affected by natural objects, or by painting or architecture; yet words have as considerable a share in exciting ideas of beauty and of the sublime as many of those, and sometimes a much greater than any of them. Therefore an inquiry into the manner by which they excite such emotions is far from being unnecessary, in a discourse of this kind.

Section II. THE COMMON EFFECTS OF POETRY, NOT BY RAISING IDEAS OF THINGS. The common notion of the power of poetry and eloquence, as well as that of words in ordinary conversation, is that they affect the mind by raising in it ideas of those things for which custom has appointed them to stand. To examine the truth of this notion, it may be requisite to observe that words may be divided into three sorts. The first are such as represent many simple ideas united by nature to form some one determinate composition, as man, horse, tree, castle, etc. These I call aggregate words. The second are they that stand for one simple idea of such compositions, and no more; as red, blue, round, square, and the like. These I call simple abstract words. The third are those which are formed by an union- an arbitrary union of both the others, and of the various relations between them, in greater or lesser degrees of complexity; as virtue, honor, persuasion, magistrate, and the like. These I call compound abstract words. Words, I am sensible, are capable of being classed into more curious distinctions; but these seem to be natural, and enough for our purpose; and they are disposed in that order in which they are commonly taught, and in which the mind gets the ideas they are substituted for.

I shall begin with the third sort of words, - compound abstracts, such as virtue, honor, persuasion, docility. Of these I am convinced that, whatever power they may have on the passions, they do not derive it from any representation raised in the mind of the things for which they stand. As compositions, they are not real essences, and hardly cause, I think, any real ideas. Nobody, I believe, immediately on hearing the sounds virtue, liberty, or honor, conceives any precise notions of the particular modes of action and thinking, together with the mixed and simple ideas, and the several relations of them, for which these words are substituted. Neither has he any general idea, compounded of them; for if he had, then some of those particular ones, though indistinct, perhaps, and confused, might soon come to be perceived. But this, I take it, is hardly ever the case. For, put yourself upon analyzing one of these words, and you must reduce it from one set of general words to another, and then into the simple abstracts and aggregates, in a much longer series than may be at first imagined,

before any real idea emerges to light, - before you come to discover anything like the first principles of such compositions;. and when you have made such a discovery of the original ideas, the effect of the composition is utterly lost. A train of thinking of this sort is much too long to be pursued in the· ordinary ways of conversation; nor is it at all necessary that it should. Such words are in reality but mere sounds; but they are sounds which, being used on particular occasions, wherein we receive some good, or suffer some evil, or see others affected with good or evil, or which we hear applied to other interesting things or events; and being applied in such a variety of cases that we know readily by habit to what things they belong, they produce in the mind, whenever they are afterwards mentioned, effects similar to those of their occasions. The sounds being often used without reference to any particular occasion, and carrying still their first impressions, they at last utterly lose their connection with the particular occasions that gave rise to them; yet the sound, without any annexed notion, continues to operate as before.

Section III. GENERAL WORDS BEFORE IDEAS. Mr. Locke has somewhere observed, with his usual sagacity, that most general words those belonging to virtue and vice, good and evil, especially are taught before the particular modes of action to which they belong are presented to the mind; and with them the love of the one, and the abhorrence of the other. For the minds of children are so ductile that a nurse, or any person about a child, by seeming pleased or displeased with any thing, or even any word, may give the disposition of the child a similar turn. When, afterwards, the several occurrences in life come to be applied to these words, and that which is pleasant often appears under the name of evil, and what is disagreeable to nature is called good and virtuous, a strange confusion of ideas and affections arises in the minds of many, and an appearance of no small contradiction between their notions and their actions. There are many who love virtue and who detest vice, and this not from hypocrisy or affectation, who notwithstanding very frequently act ill and wickedly in particulars, without the least remorse, because these particular occasions never came into view when the passions on the side of virtue were so

warmly affected by certain words heated originally by the breath of others. And for this reason it is hard to repeat certain sets of words, though owned by themselves unoperative, without being in some degree affected, especially if a warm and affecting tone of voice accompanies them. As suppose —

Wise, valiant, generous, good, and great.

These words, by having no application, ought to be unoperative; but when words commonly sacred to great occasions are used, we are affected by them, even without the occasions. When words which have been generally so applied are put together without any rational view, or in such a manner that they do not rightly agree with each other, the style is called bombast. And it requires in several cases much good sense and experience to be guarded against the force of such language; for when propriety is neglected, a greater number of these affecting words may be taken into the service, and a greater variety may be indulged in combining them.

Section IV. THE EFFECT OF WORDS. If words have all their possible extent of power, three effects arise in the mind of the hearer. The first is, the sound; the second, the picture, or representation of the thing signified by the sound; the third is the affection of the soul produced by one or by both of the foregoing. Compounded abstract words, of which we have been speaking (honor, justice, liberty, and the like), produce the first and the last of these effects, but not the second. Simple abstracts are used to signify some one simple idea, without much adverting to others which may chance to attend it, as blue, green, hot, cold, and the like. These are capable of affecting all three of the purposes of words, as the aggregate words (man, castle, horse, etc.) are in a yet higher degree. But I am of opinion that the most general effect, even of these words, does not arise from their forming pictures of the several things they would represent in the imagination; because, on a very diligent examination of my own mind, and getting others to consider theirs, I do not find that once in twenty times any such picture is formed; and when it is, there is most commonly a particular effort of the imagination for that purpose. But the aggregate words operate, as I said of the compound-abstracts, not by

presenting any image to the mind, but by having from use the same effect, on being mentioned, that their original has when it is seen.

Suppose we were to read a passage to this effect: "The river Danube rises in a moist and mountainous soil in the heart of Germany, where, winding to and fro, it waters several principalities, until, turning into Austria, and laving the walls of Vienna, it passes into Hungary. There, with a vast flood, augmented by the Saave and the Drave, it quits Christendom, and, rolling through the barbarous countries which border on Tartary, it enters by many mouths in the Black Sea." In this description many things are mentioned, as mountains, rivers, cities, the sea, etc. But let anybody examine himself, and see whether he has had impressed on his imagination any pictures of a river, mountain, watery soil, Germany, etc. Indeed it is impossible, in the rapidity and quick succession of words in conversation, to have ideas both of the sound of the word and of the thing represented. Besides, some words, expressing real essences, are so mixed with others of a general and nominal import, that it is impracticable to jump from sense to thought, from particulars to generals, from things to words, in such a manner as to answer the purposes of life; nor is it necessary that we should.

Section V. EXAMPLES THAT WORDS MAY AFFECT WITHOUT RAISING IMAGES. I find it hard to persuade several that their passions are affected by words from whence they have no ideas, and yet harder to convince them that, in the ordinary course of conversation, we are sufficiently understood without raising any images of the things concerning which we speak. It seems to be an odd subject of dispute with any man, whether he has ideas in his mind or not. Of this, at first view, every man, in his own forum, ought to judge without appeal. But, strange as it may appear, we are often at a loss to know what ideas we have of things, or whether we have any ideas at all upon some subjects. It even requires a good deal of attention to be thoroughly satisfied on this head. Since I wrote these papers, I found two very striking instances of the possibility there is that a man may hear words without having any idea of the things which they represent, and yet afterwards be capable of return

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