He had no doubt that property was a rightful index to power; and to disturb prescription seemed to him the opening of the flood gates.

Nor must we miss the religious aspect of his philosophy.

He never doubted that religion was the foundation of the English State.

"Englishmen," he said in the _Reflections on the French Revolution_ (1790), "know, and what is better, we feel inwardly, that religion is the basis of civil society and the source of all good and of all comfort." The utterance is characteristic, not merely in its depreciation of reason, but in its ultimate reliance upon a mystic explanation of social facts.

Nothing was more alien from Burke's temper than deductive thinking in politics.