It was not an attitude which reason could overthrow; for its first principle was an awe in the presence of facts to which reason is a stranger.
There is, moreover, in Burke a Platonic idealism which made him, like later thinkers of the school, regard existing difficulties with something akin to complacent benevolence.

What interested him was the idea of the English State; and whatever, as he thought, deformed it, was not of the essence of its nature.

He denied, that is to say, that the degree to which a purpose is fulfilled is as important as the purpose itself.

A thing becomes good by the end it has in view; and the deformities of time and place ought not to lead us to deny the beauty of the end.

It is the great defect of all idealistic philosophy that it should come to the examination of facts in so optimistic a temper.