Conventional Whiggism has no foothold after he has done with its analysis.

His utilitarianism was the first efficient substitute for the labored metaphysics of the contract school; and even if he was not the first to see through its pretensions--that is perhaps the claim of Shaftesbury--he was the first to show the grounds of their uselessness.

He saw that history and psychology together provide the materials for a political philosophy.
So that even if he could not himself construct it the hints at least were there.
[Footnote 17: There are few books which show so clearly as Lorimer's _Institutes of Nations_ (1872) how fully the Scottish school was in the midstream of European thought.] His suggestiveness, indeed, may be measured in another fashion.

The metaphysics of Burke, so far as one may use a term he would himself have repudiated, are largely those of Hume.

The place of habit and of social instinct alongside of consent, the perception that reason alone will not explain political facts, the emphasis upon resistance as of last resort, the denial that allegiance is a mere contract to be presently explained, the deep respect for order--all these are, after all, the fabric from which the thought of Burke was woven.