“Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit.”Edmund Burke · Reflecții asupra Revoluției din Franța · 1790 · paragraful despre prejudecată și virtute
Virtue is stronger as habit than as an argued conclusion.
Burke uses 'prejudice' in its older sense of pre-formed, inherited judgment, not hatred. The point: a person who has absorbed moral inclinations from family and community acts well spontaneously, without calculating. The mechanism is habit — virtue becomes reflex rather than effort. Example: someone who does not lie not because they proved lying is wrong philosophically, but because that is how they were raised.
If virtue becomes reflex, then time is a moral ally, not an enemy. Habits cannot be invented overnight; they settle slowly, like sediment. This is the stakes of Burke's politics: a society is a store of judgments tested across generations, and destroying them leaves people without the instincts that guide them. Think of the neighbor who helps put out a fire before wondering whether it is his business. He weighed nothing; he was simply prepared. But if habit is that strong, an awkward question arises: what do we do when an inherited habit is itself unjust?
Why it matters It helps explain why upbringing and surrounding example matter more than written rules, and why reforms that ignore habit tend to fail.