These citations are enough to show a partiality toward argument of this aspect. But a rehearsal of his general observations on politics and administration will show it in even clearer light. Burke had an obsessive dislike of metaphysics and the methods of the metaphysician. There is scarcely a peroration or passage of appeal in his works which does not contain a gibe, direct or indirect, at this subject. In the _Speech On American Taxation_ he said, “I do not enter into these metaphysical distinctions; I hate the very sound of them.”[54] This science he regarded as wholly incompatible with politics, yet capable of deluding a certain type of politician with its niceties and exactitudes. Whenever Burke introduced the subject of metaphysics, he was in effect arguing from contraries; that is to say, he was asserting that what is metaphysically true is politically false or unfeasible. For him, metaphysical clarity was at the opposite pole from political prudence. As he observed in the _Reflections_, “The pretended rights of these theories are all extremes; and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false.”[55] In the first letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, he ridiculed “the metaphysicians of our times, who are the most foolish of men, and who, dealing in universals and essences, see no difference between more and less.”[56] It will be noted that this last is a philosophical justification for his regular practice of weighing a principle by the scale of magnitude of situation. The “more and less” thus becomes determinative of the good. “Metaphysics cannot live without definition, but prudence is cautious how she defines,”[57] he said in the _Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs_. And again in the _Reflections_, “These metaphysic rights, entering into common life, like rays of light which pierce into a dense medium are by the laws of nature refracted from a straight line. Indeed, in the gross and complicated mass of human passions and concerns, the primitive rights of man undergo such a variety of refractions and reflections, that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction.”[58] Finally, there is his clear confession, “Whenever I speak against a theory, I mean always a weak, erroneous, fallacious, unfounded theory, and one of the ways of discovering that it is a false theory is by comparing it with practice.” This is the philosophical explanation of the source in circumstance of Burke’s characteristic argument.