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of politics is by its very nature such as to baffle all attempts to reach results of scientific universality and exactness. No statements in all his writings are more emphatic than those upon this point. Nothing universal,' he roundly asserts, can be ationally affirmed on any moral or any political subject'; 1 and the sweeping generalisation is but one of many similar passages: No lines can be laid down for civil or political wisdom. They are a matter incapable of exact definition.' 2 'Aristotle,' he remarks elsewhere,' the great master of reasoning, cautions us, and with great weight and propriety, against this species of delusive geometrical accuracy in moral arguments, as the most fallacious of all sophistries.' 3

It is manifest at a glance that this involves conclusions of nothing less than the first importance. It draws the distinction, Aristotelian in its emphasis, between the mathematical sciences and political science. It commits itself to the assertion that universal laws, strictly so-called, are in the nature of things unattainable in the latter. It avers, in short (with Aristotle), that a science of politics is impossible. Clearly, therefore, this sworn foe of theory has reached a theory of first-rate theoretical significance. And all this, it may be added, is doubly valuable because Burke's assault upon abstract theory and 1 Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.

2 Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents.
3 Speech on Conciliation with America.

abstract theorists cannot be said to have been/ historically victorious. For though it gave a blow to the doctrine of the rights of man,' against which it was directly levelled, a blow from which that memorable dogma never again quite lifted up its head, it did not prevent abstract theory from springing to life again in some of its most abstract forms. The first quarter of the nineteenth century was to see the Benthamite theory of government expounded, by the uncompromising logic of James Mill, in what Burke would have called 'all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction.' Almost simultaneously, Ricardo, one of the most abstract minds the world has ever seen, developed a political economy with a disregard of 'circumstances' so pronounced as to have led one critic 1 to brand his work as an intellectual imposture.' And not less unfalteringly, John Austin, building on Hobbes and Bentham, gave the world, the English world at any rate, that juristic doctrine of Sovereignty which has always, and rightly, been regarded as one of the most thoroughgoing specimens of the abstract and analytic, as contrasted with the historical method. And Austin, needless to say, was long, and even to our own day is, a commanding figure in English jurisprudence.

Nor is this vitality of abstraction and abstract method to be lamented. It has a permanent value.

1 Toynbee in his Industrial Revolution.

For it may well suggest, and it has suggested, that the right path for the political philosopher lies, not in a repudiation of abstraction-for this would be the abandonment of analysis-but rather in pressing abstraction in many directions, and thereby preparing the way for a comprehensive social synthesis in which competing-though by no means irreconcilable-abstractions may find at once their completion and corrective.

None the less Burke's influence remained. It is at any rate in harmony with the drift of his teaching that Macaulay, his enthusiastic eulogist' our greatest mind since Milton,' he calls him-urged, with all the resources of his rhetoric, the claims of a Baconian' inductive method, in that controversy without quarter in which he withstood James Mill and the Benthamite theory of government to the face. So when Comte, in his enthusiasm for a concrete social science, waged a war of extermination against abstract political economy. So not least, when J. S. Mill was constrained to acknowledge that, in that duel between his father and Macaulay over the Benthamite theory of government, James Mill was wrong, and even to assert that a science of government-that doctrine so dear to his father's heart-was impossible.1 And so also at a later time, when Sir Henry Maine, deeply dipped in the history of institutions, and keenly

1 Cf. Logic, Bk. vI. c. ix.

alive to the qualifications which Austinian sovereignty' must experience in the eyes of all students of early law and custom, declared that Austinian identification of law with force, and of sovereignty with the fiat of a political superior, would need for its verification the discovery of an absolute despot with a disturbed brain.1 Nor is it less in the spirit of Burke that nineteenth-century sociology should have so frankly embraced the historical method. For whether by 'historical method' we mean simply the inductive study of institutions as they present themselves in history, or, more precisely and properly, the genetic study of institutions as they pass through phases of historical development, the historical point of view is substantially that of Burke when he turned away, with many a gibe and sarcasm, from abstraction and all its ways, and declared that his was the better foundation-the foundation laid in the actual concrete, verifiable experience of men and nations. It is no doubt difficult to judge how far these writers of the nineteenth century draw upon Burke. For Burke's thought, not being avowedly theoretical, has never won adequate acknowledgment from avowed theorists. But, be this as it may, few contributions to method are more valuable than Burke's whole handling of the 'philosophers' of abstraction. The results of his handling of the theorists are far wider

1 Early History of Institutions.

than its aim. Its aim was to overthrow pestilent fanatics who were recklessly rushing to reform and revolution with 'rights of man' and suchlike watchwords, or catchwords, on their lips: its results were to open the eyes of every reader of his works, from the American Speeches onwards, to the nature of political fact, to the difficulties of social investigation, and to the limitations that dog the steps of analysis and generalisation the moment they turn from the mathematical or physical world to try to frame a science of society.

This was a service of the first magnitude. The century that was about to begin when Burke died (1797) was to see science freely extending its interest from Nature to man. And nothing could be more fortunate than that, on the threshold of this adventure, it should have its eyes opened to the nature of the new order of facts with which it had to deal. This was what Burke was pre-eminently fitted to do. He was steeped in politics. He knew what political fact was by lifelong contact with it. He saw the men he saw the things.' He realised the complexity and ever-shifting combinations of the world of affairs. He understood the force of circumstances. He looked at society as a whole. And in these ways, by the irony of fate, in denouncing 'modern philosophers,' he furnished in his speeches and writings one of the best of all introductions to modern social philosophy.

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