Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Continuing yesterday's train of thought.... a hiker rounds the top of a hill and sees below him a vista, the one he had made the hike for, one of those that inspired the creation of the word "sublime." If he says anything it is a verbal exhale, something like "ahhhhh," because words fail. He is having a good moment and, assuming he gets home without mishaps, without running afoul of a mountain lion or such,  he will call this a good day on the strength of that moment. Of course the moment doesn't last. It is, as we've been saying, evanescent. Its significance as an intrinsic moral good owes something to that evanescence. Soon, practical concerns bound up with that safe trip home we've just postulated will take over and the sublimity will fade. It is worth our while observing the intermixture of permanence with evanescence here. The hill itself is enduring -- it was there before our hiker approached it. It was there before there was a soci...

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...