“Extreme light, by overcoming the organs of sight, obliterates all objects, so as in its effects exactly to resemble darkness. After looking for some time at the sun, two black spots, the impression which it leaves, seem to dance before our eyes. Thus are two ideas, as opposite as can be imagined, reconciled in the extremes of both; and both, in spite of their opposite nature, brought to concur in producing the sublime.”

—Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1806; as quoted by Marjorie Hope Nicolson in Newton Demands the Muse, 1946.