Leighton Library, Dunblane

Scotland's oldest purpose-built independent library founded in 1687

Leighton Library has 1801 edition of “A philosophical inquiry into the origin of our ideas on the sublime and beautiful” by Edmund Burke

Added at 07:32 on 09 July 2025

The Leighton Library has 1801 edition of “A philosophical inquiry into the origin of our ideas on the sublime and beautiful” by Anglo-Irish politician, journalist and philosopher Edmund Burke, who died #OnThisDay 9 July 1797.

He is regarded as the founder of the social and cultural philosophy of conservatism. This treatise on aesthetics was the first complete philosophical exposition for separating the beautiful and the sublime into their own respective rational categories.

According to Edmund Burke, the Beautiful is that which is well-formed and aesthetically pleasing, whereas the Sublime is that which has the power to compel and destroy.

< Leighton Library has 1696 first edition of the tract "Decreti oxoniensis vindicatio" by Robert South