POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE CHAPTER I THEORIES AND THEORISTS THERE is a passage in Burke's writings in which he says that he does not vilify theory,1 and the remark is truer than he knew. But it does not alter the fact that, in the whole range of our literature, there is no decrier of theories and theorists comparable to him. Sometimes he despises them; sometimes he fears them; always, or almost always, he appears to hate them. In a large proportion of his political writings there is a point at which, despite his deep-seated rationality, he drops argument and betakes himself to missiles. 'Refining speculatists,' smugglers of adulterated metaphysics,' 'atheistical fathers,' 'metaphysical knights of the sorrowful countenance, 'political aeronauts '—these may suffice as fragments from the commination service. Or shall we add this, as sum of the whole matter : 'They are modern philosophers, which when you say of them you express everything that is ignoble, 1 Speech in May 1782. A savage and hard-hearted.' Small wonder that he This is remarkable. But it is not so remarkable as the fact that it is to this denouncer of theories, this vilipender of theorists, that the world has turned, and never in vain, not only for the oracles of practical wisdom, but for that large reasoning discourse upon the nature of society, and man's place in it as a political and religious animal, which makes it impossible to withhold from its exponent the designation of thinker, theorist, and philosopher. This is, in truth, the paradox of Burke's position as a political thinker. Constrained by the force of circumstances, not less than by personal proclivity, to turn from the theoretic to the practical life, he carried into affairs a reasoning imagination which had been fed and nurtured on wider pastures than those where politicians browse in happy unconsciousness of their limitations. He had dipped into philosophies; it is evident, though the record of his intellectual debts is meagre and obscure, that, not to mention lesser names, he had studied Aristotle, Locke, and Montesquieu; and he even appears, in early days, to have contemplated the tough task of refuting Hume. The Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and 1 Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol. |