A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Published in 1757 (expanded 2nd edn 1759), proposes a division of aesthetic experience, consisting of the sublime, associated with ideas such as vastness, terror and darkness; and the beautiful, associated instead with ideas such as littleness, brightness and smoothness. Burke 's Philosophical Enquiry was a well-known and influential work, stimulating philosophers and aestheticians of the eighteenth century such as Kant and Lessing, although the Philosophical Enquiry 's importance declined during the Victorian period (see Ruskin and Burke).