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    sity ; they are co-extensive with the whole rafcge of our intelligence , and include every mode of cognizable existences * They are animate and inanimate ; mental and material . Beauty and sublimity are excited equally by the cloud-capped tower and the lily of the valley , a rainbow or a rock , a sentiment , a horse , a machine , a face , a sound , a mountain , a syllogism , a poem , or a surgical operation . Any one of these , according to the state or disposition of the mind by which it is encountered , may give rise to a feeling of beauty or of terror , the pleasures of hope , the enjoyment of sublimity , or the fury of hatred and despair .

    Nor does a pleasure of imagination differ in itself from a pleasure of desire or love Either of them being considered apart from the circumstances respectively connected with their development ; from the ideas which accompany or suggest them ; considered and compared merely as emotions , they differ but in intensity and vividness . It is the difference in the antecedents which originate and authorise the difference of name conferred on them , just as there may be no distinguishable difference between three lots of money received by a man . at the year ' s end . Nevertheless , regarding and with the intention to denote the differences in the circumstances which put him in possession of them , he calls one lot rent , another profits , the third wages .

    By keeping in view the principle that it is the absence of anticipation , general or particular , which characterises the emotions of imagination , it will easily be seen how the pleasure of beauty , by degrees , melts into and merges in that of desire , as by the concurrence of new associations , our admiration of the beauty of an engraving gives way to , or becomes , a desire * to possess it . And so in the case of sublimity . Let us suppose ourselves gazing in admiration at the Alpine scenery of Switzerland ; the ideas of power , of grandeur , and stedfastness ,

    produce a pleasurable excitement , which , as it involves no anticipation , is an enjoyment of the imagination . But let us discover that an avalanche is descending from those sublime heights , that the foaming cataract is gradually undermining our footing , and we must have strong nerves if our feeling be not changed into one of fear .

    I am the more particular in insisting upon this as the distinguishing point of the emotions of imagination , because I have not found it observed in those Essays which I have consulted for instruction on the subject of this paper . The definitions of Alison , Jeffray , and Mill , appear to me all defective in this point . Engaged in the reduction of the emotions of beauty and sublimity to cases of association , they seem to me

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    Is there a Standard of Taste f 33

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    No . 121 . G ;

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1837, page 33, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1827/page/35/