[aeengine-main] Ts details are only doubtfully known. Burk

[Leif <re...@de...>]

Corroborating old ones, but by setting men to consider the consequences
to life of different opinions on these abstract subjects, and their
relations to the great paramount interests of society, however those
interests may happen at the time to be conceived. Burke's book marks a
turning-point in literary history, because it was the signal for that
reaction over the whole field of thought, into which the Revolution
drove many of the finest minds of the next generation, by showing the
supposed consequences of pure individualistic rationalism. We need not
attempt to work out the details of this extension of a political
reaction into a universal reaction in philosophy and poetry. Any one may
easily think out for himself what consequences in act and thought, as
well as in government, would be likely to flow, for example, from one of
the most permanently admirable sides of Burke's teaching--his respect
for the collective reason of men, and his sense of the impossibility in
politics and morals of considering the individual apart from the
experience of the race. "We are afraid," he says, "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. _Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding
general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom
which prevails in them_. If they find what they seek, and they seldom
fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice with the reason
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