Natural Society and Natural Religion, 1750–1756

Prior to developing his conception of the limits of natural reason, Burke had come to privilege the achievements of artificial reason. He acquired this preference during the course of his legal studies. This chapter describes how within five years of his arrival in London, Burke was extending his ideas about the limits of pure reason to contemporary debates about the mysteries of the creation and revelation. He first ventured along this path in a series of essays that he wrote in the early 1750s. His first major publication, A Vindication of Natural Society is less an exercise in political philosophy than a literary polemic concerned to expose the limits of deism. Together with his early essays, it reveals the scale and depth of his suspicion of religious skepticism as publicised by men like John Toland, Anthony Collins, Matthew Tindal, and Bolingbroke. It provides a glimpse his early debts to Tillotson, Stillingfleet, and Berkeley, as well as his enduring sympathy with the epistemologies of Locke and Butler.