‘Whatever is in any sort terrible or is conversant about terrible objects or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime.’ This terror, as defined by Edmund Burke in his 1757 essay A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, is what humans feel when faced with greatness beyond measurement. The power of a thunderstorm, a mountain range of inexpressible size, and the existential epiphany of our spiritual insignificance in the vast sweep of the universe.
