Beautiful exists to show that he was not averse to an excursion of his own into æsthetic theory. And every speech, pamphlet, or treatise which he gave to the world is proof of the range of his reading, and not least in history and politics. Above all, he had thought profoundly, and argued himself with all comers into deep-seated convictions. The result was that, when he became a Whig politician, he was already far more. A mere politician he could not be. When he encountered a political problem it was not in him to deal with it in ordinary fashion, and to be content to cut knots with the blunt hatchet of common sense. He went on refining,' as Goldsmith said. And to good purpose. For the inherent rationality and penetrative insight of his mind were not to be denied. Hardly could a policy, a bill, an amendment, an administrative act come before him which he did not press back to principles with a thoroughness which raised it far above the levels of ordinary politics into the upper air of political thought. No politician, either in ancient or in modern times, has had so irrepressible a faculty of lifting even the passing incidents of the political hour into the region of great ideas. A rival candidate dies suddenly in the course of an election contest: 'the melancholy event of yesterday,' so runs Burke's comment, . . . has feelingly told us what shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue.' An enemy attacks his well-earned pension, and

evokes that Letter to a Noble Lord (1776) which Lord Morley has called the best repartee in the English language; as indeed it is, not only because it goes home to the quick, but because it smothers the spitefulness of the assailant in a flood of eloquence and wisdom. Similarly, and in intensified degree, when he handles the larger issues of politics he goes to meet them as a statesman, but he never leaves them till he has enriched their discussion by the insight and reflection of the thinker. For however he makes haste to disclaim acting upon theory, this does not prevent him from theorising upon his actions. In truth, he theorised upon them with such habitual persistence that no one can rise from a perusal of his writings without feeling that he has been led on to what falls little or at all short of a political philosophy. A theorising politician is of course not the same as a political theorist, but he is on the highroad to becoming one.

Yet this paradox (as we have called it) of Burke's position is not so acute as might at first sight appear. For it quickly becomes manifest that what he means, in his diatribes, by a modern philosopher' is precisely what a modern philosopher is not, if one may be allowed to generalise from some of the best of that diversified species. The theorists, the 'modern philosophers' Burke had in view, were the apostles of abstract rights who had become, as he thought, the victims of their own abstractions, and were so

fanatically in love with their own notions of man's 'natural' rights that they had quite forgotten man's nature and experience. In short, the word 'theorist' or 'philosopher' suggested to him the type of one-ideaed abstract thinker who is almost as much the abhorrence of some modern philosophers as of Burke himself.

For, thanks above all to Hegel, but also to writers as diverse as Coleridge, Comte, Macaulay, and John Stuart Mill, we have come to see that not only the theory of abstract rights, but all abstract political theories of a like kind are open to attack upon more sides than one. From the one side comes the reminder that abstract thought can never really wed fact, and is therefore doomed either to futility or fanaticism, if it does not come to terms with the force of circumstances. And from another side, not necessarily hostile to abstractions, we have the insistence that an abstract theory, even if it be granted that, within its own abstract province, it is the truth and nothing but the truth, is not the whole truth; nor ever can be, till it is at once completed and corrected by equally legitimate abstractions, which along with it divide the many sided complex domain of concrete social fact. In the first of these two cases, abstract theory simply is confronted with the empirical facts of life and history; in the second, it is bidden to accept its modest place as but one of many aspects which the rich and com

plex tissue of experience may offer to the dissecting knife of social analysis. Nor is anything more characteristic of modern philosophers than to insist upon one or other, or both, of these requirements. For philosophy has, for the most part, ceased to seek for reality in a region behind and beyond experience it is more concerned to discuss and define what 'experience' is. And one of the first fruits of this scrutiny is the disclosure of the fact that experience is much too complex and many sided to be understood either by any one-sided abstract method or by any purely observational method, and indeed demands, if justice is to be done to it, that analysis and abstraction should be freely pushed in many directions. For never can the concrete reality of things be understood till it has thus been exhaustively resolved into its constitutive forces, tendencies, and conditions.

Hence it turns out that, in his assaults upon theory and theorists, Burke renders theory a twofold service. On the one hand, he is never weary of confronting abstractions with concrete facts. He is oftenest

'

quoted as the prophet of circumstances.' 'I never placed your solid interests upon speculative grounds,' he said to his constituents. 'I must see the men, I must see the things,' he elsewhere cries. 'I never govern myself, no rational man ever did govern himself by abstractions and universals...: he who does not take circumstances into consideration

is not erroneous, but stark mad-dat operam ut cum ratione insaniat-he is metaphysically mad.' 1 One more sentence (it has been quoted a thousand times) may clinch the point : 'Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect.' 2

Yet this, even this, is not Burke's greatest service to theory. For it is a service greater still, and philosophically far more significant, that as he added speech to speech, and pamphlet to pamphlet, there grew under his hands a conception of civil society so rich, so comprehensive, so coherent, that it must stand, so long as English literature is read, as a touchstone of all abstract theories which, by failing to do justice to the complexity of the social system, fall into the pitfall, so perilous to abstract thinkers, of losing sight of the concrete whole in preoccupation with the limited, fragmentary, abstract part, aspect, or element. To see human life, no less than Nature, as a whole-this is of the essence of the philosophical spirit. It is also the spirit of Burke.

Nor are these the only services that this decrier of theories renders to theory. For, in the very force and fervour of his invective against 'modern philosophers,' he himself lights upon a principle of immense philosophical significance-none other than the old Aristotelian doctrine that the subject-matter 1 Speech, May 11, 1792. 2 Reflections on the Revolution.