ce greater effects than it is found to do in
others. Extension is either in length, height, or depth. Of these the
length strikes least; a hundred yards of even ground will never work
such an effect as a tower a hundred yards high, or a rock or mountain of
that altitude. I am apt to imagine, likewise, that height is less grand
than depth; and that we are more struck at looking down from a
precipice, than looking up at an object of equal height; but of that I
am not very positive. A perpendicular has more force in forming the
sublime, than an inclined plane, and the effects of a rugged and broken
surface seem stronger than where it is smooth and polished. It would
carry us out of our way to enter in this place into the cause of these
appearances, but certain it is they afford a large and fruitful field of
speculation. However, it may not be amiss to add to these remarks upon
magnitude, that as the great extreme of dimension is sublime, so the
last extreme of littleness is in some measure sublime likewise; when we
attend to the infinite divisibility of matter, when we pursue animal
life into these excessively small, and yet organized beings, that
escape the nicest inquisition of the sense; when we push our discoveries
yet downward, and consider those creatures so many degrees yet smaller,
and the still diminishing scale of existence, in tracing which the
imagination is lost as well as the sense; we become amazed and
confounded at the wonders of minuteness; nor can we distinguish in its
effect this extreme of littleness from the vast itself. For division
must be infinite as well as addition; because the idea of a perfect
unity can no more be arrived at, than that of a complete whole, to which
nothing may be added.

SECTION VIII.

INFINITY.

Another source of the sublime is _infinity_; if it does not rather
belong to the last. Infinity has a tendency to fill the mind with that
sort of delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect, and truest
test of the sublime. There are scarce any things which can become the
objects of our senses, that are really and in their own nature infinite.
But the eye not being able to perceive the bounds of many things, they
seem to be infinite, and they produce the same effects as if they were
really so. We are deceived in the like manner, if the parts of some
large object are so continued to any indefinite number, that the
imagination meets no check which may hinder its extending them