The mental mood appropriate for a feeling of the sublime requires the mind's susceptibility for ideas, since it is precisely in the failure of nature to attain to these and consequently only under presupposition of this susceptibility and of the straining of the imagination to use nature as a schema for ideas that there is something forbidding to sensibility, but which, for all that, has an attraction for us, arising from the fact of its being adominion which reason exercises over sensibility with a view to extending it to the requirements of its own realm (the practical) and letting it look out beyond itself into the infinite, which for it is an abyss.