A Philosophical Inquiry in to the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke assumes that all our knowledge comes via sense experience and that we combine the simple ideas of sense into more complex one. For him the "imagination" or "a sort of creative power"(Coleridge's "fancy") operates in two ways.

One that "represents at pleasure the images of things in the order and manner in which they were received by the senses" and the next by "combining those images in a new manner, and according to different order." Thus, for Burke, imagination can never produce any thing "absolutely new".

Burke believes that the judgment of taste is universal but its universality is not objective, instead it is more subjective. The standard of taste in the sense of a set of universal rules that apply to all works of art is not possible.

To judge a work of art with these rules would be a logical judgment, but not aesthetic one. Aesthetic judgment is singular, so it can not be generalized. In raising the issue of "taste", Burke is concerned primarily with the problem of 'taste' and whether there is a single logic of taste.

He gives an example of a painter, who paints shoes, and a shoemaker. Though both different in knowledge they both share the pleasure arising from a natural objects, so far as each perceives it justly imitated. They are satisfied in seeing an agreeable figure.

Burke also believes that taste improves as judgment improves through increased knowledge, attention and exercise. He finds taste and judgment intertwined in all human activity.

Burke is also regarded for his explanation on the opposition between beauty and sublimity by a physiological theory. He made the opposition of pleasure and pain -the source of two aesthetic categories, deriving beauty from pleasure and sublimity from pain.

The pleasure of beauty has a relaxing effect on the fibers of the body, whereas, sublimity tightens these fibers. He says beautiful is something that creates affection or passion.It is playful, light, without great depth. Happiness is linked with beautiful, as it is more surfacial.

On the other hand, sublime is vast in its dimension. It is something that repels, generates terror, fear, and seriousness and has depth. Since it has great depth, it is associated to sadness, pain and gloomy in its observation.