Hence can be explained what _Savary_[45] remarks in his account of
Egypt, viz. that we must keep from going very near the Pyramids just
as much as we keep from going too far from them, in order to get the
full emotional effect from their size. For if we are too far away,
the parts to be apprehended (the stones lying one over the other) are
only obscurely represented, and the representation of them produces no
effect upon the aesthetical judgement of the subject. But if we are
very near, the eye requires some time to complete the apprehension of
the tiers from the bottom up to the apex; and then the first tiers are
always partly forgotten before the Imagination has taken in the last,
and so the comprehension of them is never complete.--The same thing
may sufficiently explain the bewilderment or, as it were, perplexity
which, it is said, seizes the spectator on his first entrance into
St. Peter’s at Rome. For there is here a feeling of the inadequacy
of his Imagination for presenting the Ideas of a whole, wherein the
Imagination reaches its maximum, and, in striving to surpass it, sinks
back into itself, by which, however, a kind of emotional satisfaction
is produced.
I do not wish to speak as yet of the ground of this satisfaction,
which is bound up with a representation from which we should least
of all expect it, viz. a representation which lets us remark its
inadequacy and consequently its subjective want of purposiveness for
the Judgement in the estimation of magnitude. I only remark that if
the aesthetical judgement is pure (i.e. _mingled with no teleological
judgement_ or judgement of Reason) and is to be given as a completely
suitable example of the Critique of the _aesthetical_ Judgement, we
must not exhibit the sublime in products of art (_e.g._ buildings,
pillars, etc.) where human purpose determines the form as well as
the size; nor yet in things of nature _the concepts of which bring
with them a definite purpose_ (_e.g._ animals with a known natural
destination); but in rude nature (and in this only in so far as it
does not bring with it any charm or emotion produced by actual danger)
merely as containing magnitude. For in this kind of representation
nature contains nothing monstrous (either magnificent or horrible);
the magnitude that is apprehended may be increased as much as you
wish provided it can be comprehended in a whole by the Imagination.
An object is _monstrous_ if by its size it destroys the purpose which
constitutes the concept of it. But the mere presentation of a concept
is called _colossal_, which is almost too great for any presentation
(bordering on the relatively monstrous); because the purpose of
the presentation of a concept is made harder [to realise] by the
intuition of the object being almost too great for our faculty of
apprehension.--A pure judgement upon the sublime must, however, have
no purpose of the Object as its determining ground, if it is to be