The Greeks, who had raised a sublime science from a pile of practical recipes, discovered that in reversing the process, in reapplying their mathematics to the world, they had no securer claims to truth than the Egyptian rope pullers.
Within this tradition, Porta was a relative latecomer; he dedicated his endeavor to a "sublime science" that catered to a courtly environment increasingly subject to absolutist leadership (Daston and Park 1998).
The title page further states that the purpose of the book was to "recreate ingenious spirits and to induce them to make farther scrutiny into these sublime sciences, and to divert them from following such vices, to which Youth (in this Age) are so much inclined".
It was possible, thought Smith, that "almost the whole body of the people" should be educated even in the "sublime" principles of science.
Instead, he's found a way to make himself an action-trash auteur, injecting doses of the sublime into vapid science fiction.
A major theme of Holmes's intricately plotted "relay race of scientific stories" is the double-edged promise of science, the sublime "beauty and terror" of his subtitle.
"The materials and luminosity in these bodies of work relate to themes of corporeality, mortality, spirituality and science – invigorating blood as sublime".
Science fiction dotes on the sublime, which ruptures the everyday and lifts the human spirit to the plateaus of high imagination.
Technologies such as immunization, plumbing, recycling, and the birth control pill have had a profound cultural impact, but they are not considered sublime nor are they generally subjects for science fiction.
In line with some trends of the time, Ibn Kammuna here ranks "the science of the soul" as the most sublime of the sciences, because the human soul is analogous to the deity.
It is the perfect model of the drive-in B-movie, a sublime mix of papier-mache creatures, suggestive sexuality, and dodgy science, with just a bit of cold-war philosophy thrown in for tang.
