Comte, again, points impressively to the Revolution as the period which illustrates more decisively than another the peril of confounding the two great functions of speculation and political action: and he speaks with just reprobation of the preposterous idea in the philosophic politicians of the epoch, that society was at their disposal, independent of its past development, devoid of inherent impulses, and easily capable of being morally regenerated by the mere modification of legislative rules.
What then was it that, in the midst of so much perspicacity as to detail, blinded Burke at the time when he wrote the _Reflections_ to the true nature of the movement?
Is it not this, that he judges the Revolution as the solution of a merely political question?
If the Revolution had been merely political, his judgment would have been adequate.

The question was much deeper.

It was a social question that burned under the surface of what seemed no more than a modification of external arrangements.

That Burke was alive to the existence of social problems, and that he was even tormented by them, we know from an incidental passage in the _Reflections_.

There he tells us how often he had reflected, and never reflected without feeling, upon the innumerable servile and degrading occupations to which by the social economy so many wretches are inevitably doomed.