Yet the meaning of this appeal to history is lost unless we bear in mind that the Enlightenment after all transmitted to Germany, from medieval thought, its foundation principle. The appeal was not from reason to experience, but from analytic thought (henceforth condemned to be merely "Understanding"--"_Verstand_") to an absolute and universal Reason (_Vernunft_) partially revealed in nature and more adequately manifested in human history as an organic process. Recourse to history was required because not of any empirical lessons it has to teach, nor yet because history bequeathes to us stubborn institutions which must be reckoned with, but because history is the dynamic and evolving realization of immanent reason. The contrast of the German attitude with that of Edmund Burke is instructive. The latter had the same profound hostility to cutting loose from the past. But his objection was not that the past is an embodiment of transcendent reason, but that its institutions are an "inheritance" bequeathed to us from the "collected wisdom" of our forefathers. The continuity of political life centers not about an inner evolving Idea, but about "our hearths, our sepulchers and our altars." He has the same suspicion of abstract rights of man. But his appeal is to experience and to practical consequences. Since "circumstances give in reality to every principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect," there is no soundness in any principle when "it stands stripped of every relation in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction."