The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 04 (of 12) eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 472 pages of information about The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 04 (of 12).

The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 04 (of 12) eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 472 pages of information about The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 04 (of 12).
to be adapted to those which are common.  It takes in too many views, it makes too many combinations, to be so much as comprehended by shallow and superficial understandings.  Profound thinkers will know it in its reason and spirit.  The less inquiring will recognize it in their feelings and their experience.  They will thank God they have a standard, which, in the most essential point of this great concern, will put them on a par with the most wise and knowing.

If we do not take to our aid the foregone studies of men reputed intelligent and learned, we shall be always beginners.  But men must learn somewhere; and the new teachers mean no more than what they effect, as far as they succeed,—­that is, to deprive men of the benefit of the collected wisdom of mankind, and to make them blind disciples of their own particular presumption.  Talk to these deluded creatures (all the disciples and most of the masters) who are taught to think themselves so newly fitted up and furnished, and you will find nothing in their houses but the refuse of Knaves’ Acre,—­nothing but the rotten stuff, worn out in the service of delusion and sedition in all ages, and which, being newly furbished up, patched, and varnished, serves well enough for those who, being unacquainted with the conflict which has always been maintained between the sense and the nonsense of mankind, know nothing of the former existence and the ancient refutation of the same follies.  It is near two thousand years since it has been observed that these devices of ambition, avarice, and turbulence were antiquated.  They are, indeed, the most ancient of all commonplaces:  commonplaces sometimes of good and necessary causes; more frequently of the worst, but which decide upon neither. Eadem semper causa, libido et avaritia, et mutandarum rerum amor.  Ceterum libertas et speciosa nomina pretexuntur; nec quisquam alienum servitium, et dominationem sibi concupivit, ut non eadem ista vocabula usurparet.

Rational and experienced men tolerably well know, and have always known, how to distinguish between true and false liberty, and between the genuine adherence and the false pretence to what is true.  But none, except those who are profoundly studied, can comprehend the elaborate contrivance of a fabric fitted to unite private and public liberty with public force, with order, with peace, with justice, and, above all, with the institutions formed for bestowing permanence and stability, through ages, upon this invaluable whole.

Place, for instance, before your eyes such a man as Montesquieu.  Think of a genius not born in every country or every time:  a man gifted by Nature with a penetrating, aquiline eye,—­with a judgment prepared with the most extensive erudition,—­with an Herculean robustness of mind, and nerves not to be broken with labor,—­a man who could spend twenty years in one pursuit.  Think of a man like the universal patriarch in Milton (who had drawn up

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The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 04 (of 12) from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.