"Our words sublime and sublimation are based on the Latin word sublimis, a compound of sub- “under; up to” and limin “threshold”, so etymologically having the sense of “as high as the top of a door”. It could literally mean “lofty; raised up” but also had a figurative sense in Latin of “exalted; eminent, aspiring”.
It turns up first in English as a verb in medieval alchemy. Something that had sublimed had been converted by heat from a solid directly into a vapour, considered to be an ethereal or higher form of nature. As it happens, a number of substances important to alchemy sublime, including sulphur, white arsenic, amber and camphor; the device in which this was done was a sublimatory. Of course, such substances condensed again to solids when they cooled, and the word was commonly applied to the whole process of heating, vaporisation and resolidification, but the change from solid to gas was always primary."
или "In aesthetics, the sublime (from the Latin sublimis ([looking up from] under the lintel, high, lofty, elevated, exalted) is the quality of greatness or vast magnitude, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation."
мне показалось вы несколько заземлили сублимацию, тогда как изначальное значение ближе к музам, прекрасной даме или Софии.
no subject
"Our words sublime and sublimation are based on the Latin word sublimis, a compound of sub- “under; up to” and limin “threshold”, so etymologically having the sense of “as high as the top of a door”. It could literally mean “lofty; raised up” but also had a figurative sense in Latin of “exalted; eminent, aspiring”.
It turns up first in English as a verb in medieval alchemy. Something that had sublimed had been converted by heat from a solid directly into a vapour, considered to be an ethereal or higher form of nature. As it happens, a number of substances important to alchemy sublime, including sulphur, white arsenic, amber and camphor; the device in which this was done was a sublimatory. Of course, such substances condensed again to solids when they cooled, and the word was commonly applied to the whole process of heating, vaporisation and resolidification, but the change from solid to gas was always primary."
или
"In aesthetics, the sublime (from the Latin sublimis ([looking up from] under the lintel, high, lofty, elevated, exalted) is the quality of greatness or vast magnitude, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation."
мне показалось вы несколько заземлили сублимацию, тогда как изначальное значение ближе к музам, прекрасной даме или Софии.