  Mendelssohn was instrumental in introducing the topic of the sublime into German aesthetics, publishing a lengthy review of Burke’s book on the beautiful and the sublime in 1758, just a year after it appeared in England (reprinted in Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften, volume 4, pp. 216–36), as well as an essay “On the Sublime and Naïve in the Fine Sciences” in the same year. In the latter essay, Mendelssohn makes a number of points that will become central to the subsequent German discussion of the sublime, especially in Kant. His premise, not surprisingly, is that “The sentiment produced by the sublime is a composite one” (“On the Sublime and the Naïve in the Fine Sciences”; Philosophical Writings, p. 195). For one thing, it may be produced by the perception or thought of an “immensity of extended magnitude” or of an “immensity of strength or unextended magnitude” (“The Sublime and Naïve”; Philosophical Writings, p. 194)—by the sight, image, or thought of something vastly big or of something vastly powerful.