Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

London

Printed for R. and J. Dodsley

1757

"Now the imagination is the most extensive province of pleasure and pain, as it is the region of our fears and our hopes, and of all our passions that are connected with them; and whatever is calculated to affect the imagination with these commanding ideas, by force of any original natural impression, must have the same power pretty equally over all men."

Besides the ideas, with their annexed pains and pleasures, which are presented by the sense; the mind of man possesses a sort of creative power of its own; either in represetnting at pleasure the images of things in the order and manner in which they were received by the senses, or in combining those images in a new manner, and according to a different order. This power is called Imagination; and to this belongs whatever is called wit, fancy, invention, and the like. But it must be observed, that this power of the imagination is incapable of producing any thing absolutely new; it can only vary the disposition of those ideas which it has received from the senses. Now the imagination is the most extensive province of pleasure and pain, as it is the region of our fears and our hopes, and of all our passions that are connected with them; and whatever is calculated to affect the imagination with these commanding ideas, by force of any original natural impression, must have the same power pretty equally over all men. For since the imagination is only the representative of the senses, it can only be pleased or displeased with the images from the same principle on which the sense is pleased or displeased with the realities; and consequently there must be just as close an agreement in the imaginations as in the senses of men. A little attention will convince us that this must of necessity be the case.
(p. 68-9)

Government::Province Geography::Region Government::Representative

Reading

18 entries in the ESTC (1757, 1759, 1761, 1764, 1765, 1766, 1767, 1770, 1771, 1772, 1773, 1776, 1782, 1787, 1792, 1793, 1796, 1798).

See (London: Printed for R. and J. Dodsley, 1757). <Link to ESTC><Link to ECCO-TCP>

Text from Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and Beautiful. Vol. XXIV, Part 2. The Harvard Classics. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909–14; Bartleby.com, 2001.

Reading Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings, ed. David Wommersly (London: Penguin Classics, 1998).

10/09/2005

09/23/2007