ingratitude, injustice, the childishness of the purposes regarded by ourselves as important and great, in the pursuit of which men inflict upon each other all imaginable evils, are so contradictory to the Idea of what men might be if they would, and conflict so with our lively wish to see them better, that, in order that we may not hate them (since we cannot love them), the renunciation of all social joys seems but a small sacrifice. This sadness--not the sadness (of which sympathy is the cause) for the evils which fate brings upon others,--but for those things which men do to one another (which depends upon an antipathy in fundamental propositions), is sublime, because it rests upon Ideas, whilst the former can only count as beautiful.--The brilliant and thorough _Saussure_,[60] in his account of his Alpine travels, says of one of the Savoy mountains, called _Bonhomme_, “There reigns there a certain _insipid sadness_.” He therefore recognised an _interesting_ sadness, that the sight of a solitude might inspire, to which men might wish to transport themselves that they might neither hear nor experience any more of the world; which, however, would not be quite so inhospitable that it would offer only an extremely painful retreat.--I make this remark solely with the design of indicating again that even depression (not dejected sadness) may be counted among the _sturdy_ affections, if it has its ground in moral Ideas. But if it is grounded on sympathy and, as such, is amiable, it belongs merely to the _languid_ affections. [I make this remark] to call attention to the state of mind which is _sublime_ only in the first case. * * * * *