In Burke's Enquiry, the causes of the sublime may be various – vastness, solitude, silence, obscurity, power – but its characteristic effect (in its highest degree) is an astonishment which pre-emptively disables reason:

The sublime ‘anticipates’ our reasonings – at once prefiguring and pre-empting, looking forward to and forestalling, reason's powers and insights. This implicit, though perhaps ambivalent, attack on reason reinforces our sense that the Burkean sublime is constituted in resistance to the Enlightenment. But in suspending reason, it seems that the sublime might have contradictory social effects: if, in its highest degree, the sublime induces an astonishment which ‘hurries us on by an irresistible force’, then it might unleash potentially disruptive, unpredictable energies; on the other hand, its inferior effects, such as admiration, reverence, and respect, apparently promise and promote social stability.