ABSTRACT
In David Hume, Edward Gibbon, and Edmund Burke are seen tendencies that indicate significant, if diversely individual, developments in style and in modes of thinking. Their very diversity suggests intellectual disintegration in the period, but all three seem alike in that they mark a transition from the mechanistic a priori thinking of many early Augustans towards a new organic concept of man and of human institutions. The first two of our trio were skeptics; Burke was a man of faith, but he too tended to rely on a psychological pragmatism or opportunism rather than on abstract theory-a position that subverted trust in reason. “Reason,” as a matter of fact, was claimed as on the side of the French Revolution: Burke was not. We must ask, then, how do these three men illuminate the movements of their day?
