The full title for Edmund Burke’s philosophical exposition on separating the beautiful and the sublime into separate categories is A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. This major work was studied by the thinking class, including Diderot and Immanuel Kant.
The ‘beautiful’ is the well-formed and aesthetically pleasing. The ‘sublime’ is that which has the power to compel and even destroy. Burke held that the preference for the sublime is what marks the transition between the Neoclassical and the Romantic eras.
Origins of these two ideals is found in their causality. Causation being divided into formal, material, efficient and final causes. The formal cause of beauty if the passion of love. Such examples of beauty’s material causes might be such qualities as smallness, smoothness, and delicacy. Beauty’s efficient cause is the calming of our nerves. Its final cause is God’s will.
But, what beauty isn’t is that which most of us might believe first and foremost. It is not proportion, fitness or perfection.
The causality of the sublime is in stark contrast to beauty. Its formal cause if fear; especially the fear of death. The material causes includes such bountiful characteristics as vastness, infinity, magnificence and similar such qualities. It’s efficient cause is in our nervous tension. Its final cause is found in how God created and then defeated Satan.
An excellent example of the sublime is expressed in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. .. so, as luck of the draw might have it, Ally and I are embarking on reading through Paradise Lost.
You may choose to read Proportion Not the Cause of Beauty In Animals as part of On the Sublime and Beautiful here:
http://www.bartleby.com/24/2/303.html
Alternatively, you may listen to it in an audiobook format along with the rest of the work at:
ALOHA PROMISES FOREVER 