religion was the foundation of the English State. "Englishmen," he said
in the _Reflections on the French Revolution_ (1790), "know, and what is
better, we feel inwardly, that religion is the basis of civil society
and the source of all good and of all comfort." The utterance is
characteristic, not merely in its depreciation of reason, but in its
ultimate reliance upon a mystic explanation of social facts. Nothing was
more alien from Burke's temper than deductive thinking in politics. The
only safeguard he could find was in empiricism.

This hatred of abstraction is, of course, the basis of his earliest
publication; but it remained with him to the end. He would not discuss
America in terms of right. "I do not enter into these metaphysical
distinctions," he said in the _Speech on American Taxation_, "I hate the
very sound of them." "One sure symptom of an ill-conducted state," he
wrote in the _Reflections_, "is the propensity of the people to resort
to theories." "It is always to be lamented," he said in a _Speech on the
Duration of Parliament_, "when men are driven to search into the
foundations of the commonwealth." The theory of a social contract he
declared "at best a confusion of judicial with civil principles," and he
found no sense in the doctrine of popular sovereignty. "The lines of
morality," he said in the _Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs_ (1791),
"are not like ideal lines of mathematics. They are broad and deep as
well as long. They admit of exceptions; they demand modifications. These
exceptions and modifications are made, not by the process of logic but
by the rules of prudence. Prudence is not only first in rank of the
virtues political and moral, but she is the director, the regulator, the
standard of them all." Nor did he hesitate to draw the obvious
conclusion. "This," he said, "is the true touchstone of all theories
which regard man and the affairs of men--does it suit his nature in
general, does it suit his nature as modified by his habits?"