In the previous chapters I have explored the epistemic feelings and the arousals which are the main features of strong experiences. In this chapter I begin by returning to surprise, which is the foundation of strong experi-ence, and then consider various other aspects of our psychology, including processing effort and attention and empathy, in order to gain a fuller understanding of strong experience. In particular, I address the problem of why ordinary objects can sometimes surprise us, as in many modernist epiphanies. I conclude this chapter by exploring some of the variability in how people have strong experiences, and how reliable their reports of a strong experience are.

Surprise

I have argued that strong experiences are a type of surprise, and one reason for saying this is that like surprise, strong experiences are often sudden. Here, for example is the diarist Hester Thrale's 1777 account of a sudden sublime experience.

There are other examples of the sudden sublime. Writing in 1747, Baillie (1996: 88) says, ‘a flood of light bursts in, and the vast heavens are on every side widely extended to the eye, it is then that the soul enlarges, and would stretch herself out to the immense expanse’. The painter Joshua Reynolds said that the greatest paintings elevate the spectator ‘at a single blow’ (Ashfield and de Bolla 1996: 159). Moses Mendelssohn (1997: 198) says that the soul is momentarily stopped in its tracks by the sublime. Kant (1952: 91) says that the sublime is ‘brought about by the feeling of a momentary check to the vital forces followed at once by a discharge all the more powerful’.