Every affection of the STRENUOUS kind (viz. that excites the consciousness of our power to overcome every obstacle--_animi strenui_) is _aesthetically sublime_, _e.g._ wrath, even despair (_i.e._ the despair of _indignation_, not of _faintheartedness_). But affections of the LANGUID kind (which make the very effort of resistance an object of pain--_animum languidum_) have nothing _noble_ in themselves, but they may be reckoned under the sensuously beautiful. _Emotions_, which may rise to the strength of affections, are very different. We have both _spirited_ and _tender_ emotions. The latter, if they rise to the height of affections, are worthless; the propensity to them is called _sentimentality_. A sympathetic grief that will not admit of consolation, or one referring to imaginary evils to which we deliberately surrender ourselves--being deceived by fancy--as if they were actual, indicates and produces a tender,[57] though weak, soul--which shows a beautiful side and which can be called fanciful, though not enthusiastic. Romances, lacrymose plays, shallow moral precepts, which toy with (falsely) so-called moral dispositions, but in fact make the heart languid, insensible to the severe precept of duty, and incapable of all respect for the worth of humanity in our own person, and for the rights of men (a very different thing from their happiness), and in general incapable of all steady principle; even a religious discourse,[58] which recommends a cringing, abject seeking of favour and ingratiation of ourselves, which proposes the abandonment of all confidence in our own faculties in opposition to the evil within us, instead of a sturdy resolution to endeavour to overcome our inclinations by means of those powers which with all our frailty yet remain to us; that false humility which sets the only way of pleasing the Supreme Being in self-depreciation, in whining hypocritical repentance and in a mere passive state of mind--these are not compatible with any frame of mind that can be counted beautiful, still less with one which is to be counted sublime.