  Burke not only thought that nature needed improvement, but also recognized its ambiguity. Ambition, for instance, was the source of enterprise and of improvement: but Burke did not suppose that the enterprise produced by this characteristic was in all its  manifestations a benefit to its exponent, and indeed once called it ‘the cause of the greatest disappointments, miseries and misfortunes, and sometimes of dangerous immoralities’  [4].  If Burke had a forward-looking mind, and believed that human nature both required and led to development, he did not think that progress was necessarily an unqualified gain: for instance, in discussing the civilizing of American savages, he saw a diminution of their courage as well as an increase in their moral goodness.