alike in the mystical foundations of their belief, and who, through
their writings, for over a hundred years in England carry on the
mystical attitude and diffuse much mystical thought.

Burke, the greatest and most philosophic of English statesmen, was so
largely because of his mystic spirit and imagination. Much of the
greatness of his political pamphlets and speeches and of their enduring
value is owing to the fact that his arguments are based on a sense of
oneness and continuity, of oneness in the social organism and of
continuity in the spirit which animates it. He believes in a life in the
Universe, in a divine order, mysterious and inscrutable in origins and
in ends, of which man and society are a part.

This society is linked together in mutual service from the lowest to the
highest. "Society is indeed a contract," he says in a memorable passage,

It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a
partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of
such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it
becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but
between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are
to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause
in the great primæval contract of eternal society, linking the
lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible
world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable
oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their
appointed place.

These are strange words for an English statesman to address to the
English public in the year 1790; the thought they embody seems more in