STE AND SMELL.

This general agreement of the senses is yet more evident on minutely
considering those of taste and smell. We metaphorically apply the idea
of sweetness to sights and sounds; but as the qualities of bodies by
which they are fitted to excite either pleasure or pain in these senses
are not so obvious as they are in the others, we shall refer an
explanation of their analogy, which is a very close one, to that part
wherein we come to consider the common efficient cause of beauty, as it
regards all the senses. I do not think anything better fitted to
establish a clear and settled idea of visual beauty than this way of
examining the similar pleasures of other senses; for one part is
sometimes clear in one of the senses that is more obscure in another;
and where there is a clear concurrence of all, we may with more
certainty speak of any one of them. By this means, they bear witness to
each other; nature is, as it were, scrutinized; and we report nothing of
her but what we receive from her own information.

SECTION XXVII.

THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL COMPARED.

On closing this general view of beauty, it naturally occurs that we
should compare it with the sublime; and in this comparison there appears
a remarkable contrast. For sublime objects are vast in their dimensions,
beautiful ones comparatively small; beauty should be smooth and
polished; the great, rugged and negligent: beauty should shun the right
line, yet deviate from it insensibly; the great in many cases loves the
right line; and when it deviates, it often makes a strong deviation:
beauty should not be obscure; the great ought to be dark and gloomy:
beauty should be light and delicate; the great ought to be solid, and
even massive. They are indeed ideas of a very different nature, one
being founded on pain, the other on pleasure; and, however they may vary
afterwards from the direct nature of their causes, yet these causes keep
up an eternal distinction between them, a distinction never to be
forgotten by any whose business it is to affect the passions. In the
infinite variety of natural combinations, we must expect to find the
qualities of things the most remote imaginable from each other united in
the same object. We must expect also to find combinations of the same
kind in the works of art. But when we consider the power of an object
upon our passions, we must know that when anything is intended to affect
the mind by the force of some predomin