  This experiental orientation of Burke's mind was turned from attitude into articulate thought through the educational medium of the Irish Enlightenment. For example, some points that may seem distinctively Burkean belonged first to Berkeley. Berkeley saw no advantages in improper abstraction or in a mythical golden age. Burke's unwillingness to judge institutions and practices without first connecting them with other things, his disinclination ‘to give praise or blame to any thing which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction’ (RRF, W &amp; S 1981–2015, viii.58), is a practical judgement that implies a conceptual counterpart like Berkeley's view that ‘when we attempt to abstract extension and motion from all other qualities, and consider them by themselves, we presently lose sight of them, and run into great extravagancies’ (Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge [1948–57, vol. ii, 84].) In both cases, philosophical wariness matched a distaste for considering aspects of objects in permanent isolation from the other aspects with which they were essentially connected. This suspicion of abstract ideas accompanied a suspicion of schemes for considering people in abstraction from their present situation, and accompanied too doubts about a golden past: Berkeley rejected ‘the rude original of society’ (Berkeley, The Querist [1948–57, vol. vi, 141]) and had no time for ‘declaimers against prejudice’ who ‘have wrought themselves into a sort of esteem for savages, as a virtuous and unprejudiced people’ (Berkeley, Discourse addressed to Magistrates [1948–57, vol. vi, 206]), and it need not be emphasized that Burke shared such views. Both belonged to an elite which considered improvement to be necessary, and sought to make it through the agencies in church, state and education that were really available at the time. Above all, they shared an intellectual temper: they sought to see things how they are, with an eye to bettering the condition of society.  But Burke was not Berkeley, and though their similarities indicate a shared philosophical orientation, Burke had his own way of developing it. To individuate him, we must turn to what he acquired from the Trinity syllabus, and how he used his acquisitions.