A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

In Part 3, Burke explores what makes something or someone beautiful. Things that are beautiful elicit feelings of love. Burkes emphasizes the difference between love and desire. Some women may not be beautiful but still evoke desire; some humans and animals may be beautiful but evoke no desire. Although love and desire are often packaged together, they are not the same concepts.

Burke systematically breaks down philosophical understandings of what makes a work of art, or any other occurrence in nature, beautiful. One of the major arguments he contests is the notion that beauty is relative to proportion. Some thinkers suggest that beauty is determined by having the correct proportions. Burke immediately rejects this idea: Proportions are mathematical and require reason, and beauty has nothing to do with reason.

Burke establishes a system for breaking down the argument of proportions and others. He utilizes four rules to guide him. First, if two properties produce the same feeling, then they must have a similarity that produces a consistent effect. Second, artificial and natural objects must produce the same effect. Third, effects produced by natural objects cannot be tied to their uses. Fourth, if a different measure can produce the same effect, then one cannot attribute the affect to a singular property.