further,--if we may so speak without irreverence,--suppose our own to
have emanated thence when "man became a living soul"? And though this
relation may not be consciously acknowledged in every instance, or
even in one, by the mass of men, does it therefore follow that it does
not exist? How many things act upon us of which we have no knowledge?
If we find, as in the case of the Beautiful, the same, or a similar,
effect to follow from a great variety of objects which have no
resemblance or agreement with one another, is it not a necessary
inference, that for their common effect they must all refer to
something without and distinct from themselves? Now in the case of
the Sublime, the something referred to is not in man: for the emotion
excited has an outward tendency; the mind cannot contain it; and the
effort to follow it towards its mysterious object, if long continued,
becomes, in the excess of interest, positively painful.

Could any finite object account for this? But, supposing the Infinite,
we have an adequate cause. If these emotions, then, from whatever
object or circumstance, be to prompt the mind beyond its prescribed
limits, whether carrying it back to the primitive past, the
incomprehensible _beginning_, or sending it into the future, to
the unknown _end_, the ever-present Idea of the mighty Author of
all these mysteries must still be implied, though we think not of it.
It is this Idea, or rather its influence, whether we be conscious of
it or not, which we hold to be the source of every sublime emotion. To
make our meaning plainer, we should say, that that which has the power
of possessing the mind, to the exclusion, for the time, of all other
thought, and which presents no _comprehensible_ sense of a whole,
though still impressing us with a full apprehension of such as a
reality,--in other words, which cannot be circumscribed by the forms
of the understanding while it strains them to the utmost,--that we