Burke on the Sublime and the Beautiful

Edmund Burke (1729-1797), an Anglo-Irish writer then in his twenties and not yet embarked on the parliamentary career for which he later became famous, published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful anonymously in London in 1757. A substantially revised and enlarged second edition followed in 1759, adding a lengthy introductory essay "On Taste" that addressed objections raised by early reviewers and clarified Burke's empirical, physiological method: rather than asking what beauty and sublimity are in some abstract metaphysical sense, Burke sets out to trace the specific passions these categories excite back to their psychological and even physical causes, in the manner of the empiricist psychology of Locke.