Born in 1729, Edmund Burke was in his twenties during the 1750s. Some of his notes from that period were collected in a slim volume called A Note-Book of Edmund Burke, edited by H.V.F. Somerset and published in 1957. An essay in the volume is “Several Scattered Hints Concerning Philosophy and Learning Collected Here from My Papers,” now republished online.
“Several Scattered Hints” is very little known, even to Burke scholars. Reproduced here are some especially worthy passages.
The essay was written before or around the time of Burke’s first works, A Vindication of Natural Society (1756) and A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of
