“I cannot conceive of a time or a state of things in which the writings of Burke will not have the highest value.” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834).
“No individual, however brilliant and well informed, can in one lifetime acquire the knowledge and wisdom that would warrant him to sit in judgment upon those complex, subtle, and persisting traditions that embody the experience and judgment of the community or the nation after thousands of experiments in the great laboratory called History. Civilization would be impossible ‘if the practice of all moral duties, and the foundations of society, rested upon having their reasons made clear and demonstrative to every individual.’
So Religion can only with great difficulty be explained to the youth who has acquired a little knowledge, and is delighting in his liberated reason; not until he has much experience of human nature, and has seen the power of primitive instincts, will he appreciate the services of religion in helping society to control the innate individualism of men. ‘If we should uncover our nakedness [release our instincts] by throwing off the Christian religion, which has been . . . one great source of civilization among us, . . . we are apprehensive . . . that some uncouth, pernicious, and degrading superstition might take the place of it.”
Likewise it is difficult to explain to the youngster newly enreasoned, and envious of his neighbors’ goods, that a man of exceptional ability will not go through long and expensive training to acquire a socially useful skill, or bestir himself to practice it, unless he is allowed to keep a portion of his earnings as a gift to his children.
Furthermore, human society is not merely an association of persons in space, it is also a succession of persons in time – of persons dead, living, and unborn, in a continuity of flesh and blood through generations. That continuity lies more deeply in us than our association with a given spot on earth; it can persist through migrations across frontiers [belying the concept of acculturation]. How can this be made clear to boys bursting with individual ambition and sophomoric pride, and recklessly ready to snap family ties and moral bonds?”
– Edmond Burke, Letter to a Noble Lord, 1796
*Will and Ariel Durant, Story of Civilization, Volume 11, p. 515
