rning men's minds to an attitude from which not only the
political incidents of the hour, but the current ideas about religion,
psychology, the very nature of human knowledge, would all be seen in
a changed light and clothed in new colour. All really profound
speculation about society comes in time to touch the heart of every
other object of speculation, not by directly contributing new truths
or directly corroborating old ones, but by setting men to consider the
consequences to life of different opinions on these abstract subjects,
and their relations to the great paramount interests of society,
however those interests may happen at the time to be conceived.
Burke's book marks a turning-point in literary history, because it was
the signal for that reaction over the whole field of thought, into
which the Revolution drove many of the finest minds of the
next generation, by showing the supposed consequences of pure
individualistic rationalism.

We need not attempt to work out the details of this extension of a
political reaction into a universal reaction in philosophy and poetry.
Any one may easily think out for himself what consequences in act
and thought, as well as in government, would be likely to flow, for
example, from one of the most permanently admirable sides of Burke's
teaching--his respect for the collective reason of men, and his
sense of the impossibility in politics and morals of considering the
individual apart from the experience of the race. "We are afraid," he
says, "to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of
reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small,
and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the
general bank and capital of nations and of ages. _Many of our men of
speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their
sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them_. If
they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more
wise to continue the prejudice with the reason involved, than to cast
away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason:
because prejudice with its reason has a motive to give action to that
reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is
of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind
in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the
man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and
unresolve