species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it almost
always acts right." And since it is the past alone which has had the
opportunity to accumulate this rightness our disposition should be to
preserve all ancient things. They could not be without a reason; and
that reason is grounded upon ancestral experience. So the prescriptive
title becomes "not the creature, but the master, of positive law ... the
soundest, the most general and the most recognized title between man and
man that is known in municipal or public jurisprudence." It is by
prescription that he defends the existence of Catholicism in Ireland not
less than the supposed deformities of the British Constitution. So, too,
his main attack on atheism is its implication that "everything is to be
discussed." He does not say that all which is has rightness in it; but
at least he urges that to doubt it is to doubt the construction of a
past experience which built according to the general need. Nor does he
doubt the chance that what he urges may be wrong. Rather does he insist
that at least it gives us security, for him the highest good. "Truth,"
he said, "may be far better ... but as we have scarcely ever that
certainty in the one that we have in the other, I would, unless the
truth were evident indeed, hold fast to peace, which has in her company
charity, the highest of the virtues."

Such a philosophy, indeed, so barely stated, would seem a defence of
political immobility; but Burke attempted safeguards against that
danger. His insistence upon the superior value of past experience was
balanced by a general admission that particular circumstances must
always govern the immediate decision. "When the reason of old
establishments is gone," he said in his _Speech on Economical Reform_,
"it is absurd to preserve nothing but the burden of them." "A
disposition to preserve and an ability to improve," he wrote in the
_Reflections on the French Revolution_, "taken together would be my