One of the apparent paradoxes of the sublime is that it became a fashionable taste in eighteenth-century Britain. As Ferguson points out, to make the sublime available as just one more consumer or tourist commodity would render it ‘factitious’ in its own terms since sublimity inevitably loses its impact with daily exposure. Thus, ‘A major dilemma of the sublime is that of preserving its difference from the custom, habit, and fashion which are continually launching insidious assimilative forays upon it’ (‘Sublime of Edmund Burke’, p. 71). Burke himself recognized this in formulating the sublime as that which, by definition, swerves away from the customary: ‘Knowledge and acquaintance make the most striking causes affect but little’; ‘Custom reconciles us to everything’ (Enquiry, pp. 61, 148). In order to maintain the sublime's novelty, Burke relies on the distinction, ubiquitous in English cultural history, between nature and custom – or, as he puts it in a passage inserted in the Enquiry in 1759, between nature and ‘second nature’: