Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event

London

James Dodsley

1790

"All your sophisters cannot produce any thing better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges."

Through the same plan of a conformity to nature in our artificial institutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful instincts, to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason, we have derived several other, and those no small benefits, from considering our liberties in the light of an inheritance. Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity. This idea of a liberal descent inspires us with a sense of habitual native dignity, which prevents that upstart insolence almost inevitably adhering to and disgracing those who are the first acquirers of any distinction. By this means our liberty becomes a noble freedom. It carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree, and illustrating ancestors. It has its bearings, and its ensigns armorial. It has its gallery of portraits; its monumental inscriptions; its records, evidences, and titles. We procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which nature teaches us to revere individual men; on account of their age; and on account of those from whom they are descended. All your sophisters cannot produce any thing better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges.
(pp 49-50, pp. 30-1 in Pocock ed.)

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Reading

At least 22 entries in the ESTC (1790, 1791, 1792, 1793).

See Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the proceedings in certain societies in London relative to that event. In a letter intended to have been sent to a gentleman in Paris (London: printed for J. Dodsley, 1790) <Link to ECCO><Link to ECCO-TCP>

Text from ECCO-TCP and Past Masters.

Reading Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). [Pocock identifies the definitive edition of Burke's Reflections as William B. Todd's (Rinehart Books, 1959)].

04/20/2013