4.1 What is it about mountain scenery that excites such specific exhilarating thoughts and feelings? Why does the proximity of great mountains to foothills with small villages accentuate these sensations. And why in particular does the additional presence of a smooth body of water with ever changing shades of blue, contrasting with the unchanging rough whites, grays and blacks of the rock, seem to magnify the effect still further?

4.2 Perhaps it is the simultaneous presence of such spectacular variety, and the contrast of small human scale with the vast scale of Natural. It is the perfect example of seeing the Big Picture. Being able to take in at once a view all the way from the pebbles at your feet, through flowers, fields and villages and then straight into steep slopes, great mountains and mountain ranges beyond. It seems to enlarge the mind. Understanding that the distant mountain you see is comprised of the same precise detail at your feet. This comprehension of scale is generally absent from people’s daily lives, mostly spent living in cities with walls across the street to cut off the view, or living in flat, unvaried countryside. And while everyone can look up anytime at something vastly bigger, the open vault of the blue sky or a night sky of stars, there is no contrast, nothing to measure the scale of that vastness.

4.3 Visibility is the term given to the distance we can see.   But what is the word for how much we can see in the distance - the amount of detail, the complexity of what we can see at one glance? In the mountains you can just about make out tiny, microbial creatures moving up the slopes. These are men, women and children climbing the slopes. To be able to see so much comprehensible detail at once is inspirational. Something about such scenery excites intellectual curiosity, and can be an inspiration to great labours, as it was for Dr Servettaz, for instance, who dedicated his entire professional life to saving his beautiful lake Annecy.

4.4 In aesthetics, the sublime is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation.

4.5 The development of the concept of the sublime as an aesthetic quality in nature distinct from beauty was first brought into prominence in the 18th century in the writings of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, and John Dennis, in expressing an appreciation of the fearful and irregular forms of external nature, and Joseph Addison's synthesis of concepts of the sublime in his The Spectator, and later the Pleasures of the Imagination. All three Englishmen had, within the span of several years, made the journey across the Alps and commented in their writings of the horrors and harmony of the experience, expressing a contrast of aesthetic qualities.

4.6 John Dennis was the first to publish his comments in a journal letter published as Miscellanies in 1693, giving an account of crossing the Alps where, contrary to his prior feelings for the beauty of nature as a "delight that is consistent with reason", the experience of the journey was at once a pleasure to the eye as music is to the ear, but "mingled with Horrours, and sometimes almost with despair". Shaftesbury had made the journey two years prior to Dennis but did not publish his comments until 1709 in the Moralists. His comments on the experience also reflected pleasure and repulsion, citing a "wasted mountain" that showed itself to the world as a "noble ruin", but his concept of the sublime in relation to beauty was one of degree rather than the sharp contradistinction that Dennis developed into a new form of literary criticism. Shaftesbury's writings reflect more of a regard for the awe of the infinity of space ("Space astonishes" referring to the Alps), where the sublime was not an aesthetic quality in opposition to beauty, but a quality of a grander and higher importance than beauty. In referring to the Earth as a "Mansion-Globe" and "Man-Container" Shaftsbury writes "How narrow then must it appear compar'd with the capacious System of its own Sun...tho animated with a sublime Celestial Spirit...." (Part III, sec. 1, 373).

4.7 Joseph Addison embarked on the Grand Tour in 1699 and commented in Remarks on Several Parts of Italy etc. that "The Alps fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror". The significance of Addison's concept of the sublime is that the three pleasures of the imagination that he identified; greatness, uncommonness, and beauty, "arise from visible objects" (that is, from sight rather than from rhetoric). It is also notable that in writing on the "Sublime in external Nature", he does not use the term "sublime", but uses terms that would be considered as absolutive superlatives, e.g. "unbounded", "unlimited", as well as "spacious", "greatness", and on occasion terms denoting excess.

4.8 Addison's notion of greatness was integral to the concept of the sublime. An art object could be beautiful but it could not rise to greatness. His work Pleasures of the Imagination, as well as Mark Akenside’s Pleasures of the Imagination (1744), and Edward Young's poem Night Thoughts (1745), led to an entire study on the concept of the sublime by Edmund Burke, in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756).

4.9 Burke was the first philosopher to argue that the sublime and the beautiful are mutually exclusive. The dichotomy is not as simple as Dennis' opposition, but antithetical to the same degree as light and darkness. Beauty may be accentuated by light, but either intense light or darkness (the absence of light) is sublime to the degree that it can obliterate the sight of an object. The imagination is moved to awe and instilled with a degree of horror by what is "dark, uncertain, and confused." While the relationship of the sublime and the beautiful is one of mutual exclusivity, either one can produce pleasure. The sublime may inspire horror, but one receives pleasure in knowing that the perception is a fiction.

4.10 Without pursuing the intricacies of Burke arguments it is clear that the mountain scenery of the Alps was now understood as capable of inspiring the most powerful of human feelings, both beauty and terror, conflicting emotions well fitted to those revolutionary times when noble ideals were leading to horrific consequences. Nature was beginning to be seen as being capable of inspiring people towards great achievements, to discover the world, to conquer the world, to change the world, and perhaps one day even to save the world. That Nature in general, and the Alps in particular, could inspire such powerful emotions marked a significant development in Man’s perception of Nature, one which was to encourage artists to develop an entirely new form of painting, distinguished by its content as much as its style.