 A different and perhaps more accommodating approach to identifying what is distinctive in aesthetic appreciation of the environment connects an older way of thinking with recent work on cognition. The eighteenth century focused attention on notions of the sublime (notably Burke [1757], but in a line of thought from Longinus) and the picturesque (Gilpin 1782, with roots in the older concept of pittoresco). These, particularly the former, have generated controversies about their relations to beauty—are they subspecies of beauty or categories distinct from it?—and about their extensions—is it only nature that can be sublime? The question also arises as to whether terms like “the sublime” pick out a class of objects to which there is actually a common aesthetic response. This sounds like something on which we could get help from the cognitive sciences, and work by Keltner and Haight (2003), drawing on a range of empirical and reflective sources, has been particularly noticed. Their work was on the concept of awe rather than the sublime but they note obvious connections, given the thought that the sublime involves a response to things physically or conceptually vast. They suggest that awe involves the recognition of the apparent vastness of the object or scene attended to and the inability of the subject to assimilate it to their existing mental schemas. Other research suggests a strongly pan-cultural component in nonverbal expressions of this emotion (Keltner et al. 2019), and its association with a diminished sense of self (Piff et al. 2015; Tom Cochrane (2012) has argued that the sublime is characterised by a feeling of self-negation). It is suggested therefore that the experience of the sublime is an aesthetic form of awe wherein the object is attended to for its own sake (Clewis 2019; Arcangeli et al. 2020), an idea elaborated by Shapsay (2021) who suggests that the sublime sometimes takes a cognitively elaborated form involving reflection of the challenge posed to existing schemata by the scene or object one confronts.