A concept deeply embedded in 18th-century aesthetics, but deriving from the 1st century rhetorical treatise On the Sublime by Longinus. The sublime is great, fearful, noble, calculated to arouse sentiments of pride and majesty, as well as awe and sometimes terror. According to Alexander Gerard, writing in 1759, ‘When a large object is presented, the mind expands itself to the extent of that object, and is filled with one grand sensation, which totally possessing it, composes it into a solemn sedateness and strikes it with deep silent wonder and admiration: it finds such a difficulty in spreading itself to the dimensions of its object, as enlivens and invigorates its frame: and having overcome the opposition which this occasions, it sometimes imagines itself present in every part of the scene which it contemplates; and from the sense of this immensity, feels a noble pride, and entertains a lofty conception of its own capacity.’ In Kant’s aesthetic theory the sublime ‘raises the soul above the height of vulgar commonplace’. We experience the vast spectacles of nature as ‘absolutely great’ and of irresistible might and power. This perception is fearful, but by conquering this fear, and by regarding as small ‘those things of which we are wont to be solicitous’ we quicken our sense of moral freedom. So we turn the experience of frailty and impotence into one of our true, inward moral freedom as the mind triumphs over nature, and it is this triumph of reason that is truly sublime. Kant thus paradoxically places our sense of the sublime in an awareness of ourselves as transcending nature, rather than in an awareness of ourselves as a frail and insignificant part of it. Most mountaineers and sailors disagree. See also environmental ethics.