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 their failure.

Nor was he less right in his denunciation of that distrust of the past which played so large a part in the revolutionary consciousness.  “We are afraid,” he wrote in the Reflections, “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.”  Of Sieyes’ building constitutions overnight, this is no unfair picture; but it points a more general truth never long absent from Burke’s mind.  Man is for him so much the creature of prejudice, so much a mosaic of ancestral tradition, that the chance of novel thought finding a peaceful place among his institutions is always small.  For Burke, thought is always at the service of the instincts, and these lie buried in the remote experience of the state.  So that men like Robespierre were asking from their subjects an impossible task.  That which they had conceived in the gray abstractness of their speculations was too little related to what the average Frenchman knew and desired to be enduring.  Burke looks with sober admiration at the way in which the English revolution related itself at every point to ideas and theories with which the average man was as familiar as with the physical landmarks of his own neighborhood.  For the motives which underlie all human effort are, he thought, sufficiently constant to compel regard.  That upon which they feed submits to change; but the effort is slow and the disappointments many.  The Revolution taught the populace the thirst for power.  But it failed to remember that sense of continuity in human effort without which new constructions are built on sand.  The power it exercised lacked that horizon of the past through which alone it suffers limitation to right ends.