That position is, moreover, the essential position of Whiggism as a political philosophy. It turns out to be, on examination, a position which is defined by other positions because it will not conceive ultimate goals, and it will not display on occasion a sovereign contempt for circumstances as radical parties of both right and left are capable of doing. The other parties take their bearing from some philosophy of man and society; the Whigs take their bearings from the other parties. Whatever a party of left or right proposes, they propose (or oppose) in tempered measure. Its politics is then cautionary, instinctive, trusting more to safety and to present success than to imagination and dramatic boldness of principle. It is, to make the estimate candid, a politics without vision and consequently without the capacity to survive. “The political parties which I call great,” Tocqueville wrote in _Democracy in America_, “are those which cling to principles rather than to their consequences, to general and not to special cases, to ideas and not to men.”[62] Manifestly the Whig Party is contrary to this on each point. The Whigs do not argue from principles (_i.e._, genera and definitions); they are awed not merely by consequences but also by circumstances; and as for the general and the special, we have now heard Burke testify on a dozen occasions to his disregard of the former and his veneration of the latter. There is indeed ground for saying that Burke was more Whig than the British Whigs of his own day themselves, because at the one time when the British Whig Party took a turn in the direction of radical principle, Burke found himself out of sympathy with it and, before long, was excluded from it. This occurred in 1791, when the electrifying influence of the French Revolution produced among the liberals of the age a strong trend toward the philosophic left. It was this trend which drew from Burke the _Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs_, with its final scornful paragraph in which he refused to take his principles “from a French die.” This writing was largely taken up with a defense of his recently published _Reflections on the Revolution in France_, and it is here relevant to note how Burke defines his doctrine as a middle course. “The opinions maintained in that book,” he said, “never can lead to an extreme, because their foundation is laid in an opposition to extremes.”[63] “These doctrines do of themselves gravitate to a middle point, or to some point near a middle.”[64] “The author of that book is supposed to have passed from extreme to extreme; but he has always actually kept himself in a medium.”[65]