tions. It also included the opposite charge that reason encouraged irresolution and doubt. Reason paralyzed the capacity for action, whereas prejudice was "of ready application in the emergency" and did "not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved." Such remarks indicate how completely Burke identified reason with free-floating, disembodied, irresponsible speculation utterly indifferent to the consequences of a given course of action—indifferent even to the need for action, decision, and moral choice, as opposed to the extrapolation of social policy from theoretical premises.

Burke's emphasis on the importance of decisive action should not be misunderstood as an Aristotelian defense of "practical reason" against theoretical speculation. Aristotle distinguished practical reason or phronesis both from theory on the one hand and from technique on the other. Burke made no such distinctions, viewing reason in general—much as the Enlightenment viewed it—as pure speculation, epistemology. According to Aristotle, the aim of practical reason was neither to establish timeless truths nor to calculate the most economical means to a given result but to promote a harmony of means and ends, to train the capacity for judgment, and above all to encourage self-knowledge. Practical reason proceeded by way of argument—the value of which, however, figured no more prominently in Burke's thought than judgment and self-knowledge. Argument, indeed, was the last thing Burke wanted to promote. When he spoke of the "ancient, permanent sense of mankind," he referred to the unspoken agreement bred by habits and "affections," not to the collective judgment that issues from deliberation.

A brilliant debater, Burke nevertheless preferred silence to the noise of debate or, in his favorite image, the decent clothing of custom to the "nakedness" he associated with reason. He praised religion as the "basis of civil society" but deplored theological controversy. Modern Christians, he wrote, took "their religion as an habit, and upon authority, and not by disputation." When he spoke of Christianity as "the one great source of civilization amongst us," he added that "throwing off" Christianity would "uncover our nakedness." In his tribute to Marie Antoinette, he spoke in the same way of "chivalry." Those who took the position that a "queen is but a woman" stripped away the "pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which by a bland assimilation incorpo

-130-