The French created an universal man not less destructive of their practical sagacity than the Frankenstein of the economists.
They omitted, as Burke saw, the elements which objective experience must demand; with the result that, despite themselves, they came rather to destroy than to fulfil.

Napoleon, as Burke prophesied, reaped the harvest of their failure.
Nor was he less right in his denunciation of that distrust of the past which played so large a part in the revolutionary consciousness.

"We are afraid," he wrote in the _Reflections_, "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." Of Sieyes' building constitutions overnight, this is no unfair picture; but it points a more general truth never long absent from Burke's mind.

Man is for him so much the creature of prejudice, so much a mosaic of ancestral tradition, that the chance of novel thought finding a peaceful place among his institutions is always small.

For Burke, thought is always at the service of the instincts, and these lie buried in the remote experience of the state.