ality upon which he seized as
the essence of the Revolution was, as Mirabeau was urging in private to
the king, the inevitable precursor of dictatorship. He realized that
freedom is born of a certain spontaneity for which the rigid lines of
doctrinaire thinkers left no room. That worship of symmetrical form
which underlies the constitutional experiments of the next few years he
exposed in a sentence which has in it the essence of political wisdom.
"The nature of man is intricate"; he wrote in the _Reflections_, "the
objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and
therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable
either to man's nature or to the quality of his affairs." The note
recurs in substance throughout his criticism. Much of its application,
indeed, will not stand for one moment the test of inquiry; as when, for
instance, he correlates the monarchical government of France with the
English constitutional system and extols the perpetual virtues of 1688.
The French made every effort to find the secret of English principles,
but the roots were absent from their national experience.

A year after the publication of the _Reflections_ he himself perceived
the narrowness of that judgment. In the _Thoughts on French Affairs_
(1791) he saw that the essence of the Revolution was its foundation in
theoretic dogma. It was like nothing else in the history of the world
except the Reformation; which last event it especially resembles in its
genius for self-propagation. Herein he has already envisaged the
importance of that "_patrie intellectuelle_" which Tocqueville
emphasized as born of the Revolution. That led Burke once again to
insist upon the peculiar genius of each separate state, the difficulties
of a change, the danger of grafting novelties upon an ancient fabric. He
saw the certainty that in adhering to an abstract metaphysical scheme
the French were in truth omitting human nature from their political
equation; for general ideas can find embodiment in institutional forms
only after they have been moulded by a thousand varieties of
circumstance. The French created an universal man not less destructive
of their practical sagacity than the Frankenstein of the economists.
They omitted, as Burke saw, the elements which objective experience must
demand; with the result that, despite themselves, they came rather to
destroy than to fulfil. Napoleon, as Burke prophesied, reaped the
harvest of t