 Roughly tracking Kant’s distinction between the mathematically and dynamically sublime, Schiller divides the sublime into the theoretical and the practical. The theoretical sublime presents nature as an object of knowledge and indicates that we “can think more than we know”; it describes for instance the mixture of fear and awe we experience when conceptualizing infinity (NA XX, 173/E 24). The practically sublime, by contrast, concerns nature as an object of feeling, specifically as a source of danger and fear. But in being confronted by a storm or natural disaster, we also become aware of our power to remain calm in the face of danger. Such experiences isolate moments at which the individual has recourse only to his “intellectual self, to the inner self-sufficiency of his rational powers” (NA XX, 177/E 28). They allow resistance on a “completely different order”, showing our sensuous being to be an “external, natural thing that has no effect at all on what we genuinely are as persons, our moral selves” (NA XX, 185/E 35). They thus allow us to acknowledge that as sensual beings, we are never safe from disease, loss, and death, but we know that we can face even our own annihilation with dignified calm. Human beings can also be what Schiller calls magnificent: they can, through physical or mental prowess, defeat what they fear. The sublime, by contrast, shows humans succumbing to the fearful but not fearing it. Because of what it says about our moral selves, observing such dignified defeat somewhat paradoxically inspires us even more than the magnificent human’s triumph. Schiller further distinguishes between the “contemplative sublimity of power”, which includes our terror in the face of silence or the dark, and “the pathetically sublime”, which requires us to witness suffering. But the basic requirements for a representation of the sublime remain the same: it must include an objective, physical power; subjective, physical impotence; and subjective or moral security in the face of that impotence (NA XX, 186/E 36).