 Edmund Burke links sublimity with pain as well as pleasure, perhaps drawing on Aristotle’s idea of “catharsis” (Burke 1757). The idea seems to be that judgments of sublimity are grounded on both pleasure and pain, whereas judgments of beauty are grounded only on pleasure. While this may fit the aesthetic experience of wind and rain in a storm at sea or up a mountain, it does not fit the sublimity of the stars in the sky and sublime delicacy of a spider’s web, where there is no exciting terror. So the pain account is not generally true of the sublime.