I never, in the course of my transition, was content to remain, for ever so short a time, confused and unsettled.

When I had taken in any new idea, I could not rest till I had adjusted its relation to my old opinions, and ascertained exactly how far its effect ought to extend in modifying or superseding them.
The conflicts which I had so often had to sustain in defending the theory of government laid down in Bentham's and my father's writings, and the acquaintance I had obtained with other schools of political thinking, made me aware of many things which that doctrine, professing to be a theory of government in general, ought to have made room for, and did not.

But these things, as yet, remained with me rather as corrections to be made in applying the theory to practice, than as defects in the theory.

I felt that politics could not be a science of specific experience; and that the accusations against the Benthamic theory of _being_ a theory, of proceeding _a priori_ by way of general reasoning, instead of Baconian experiment, showed complete ignorance of Bacon's principles, and of the necessary conditions of experimental investigation.

At this juncture appeared in the _Edinburgh Review_, Macaulay's famous attack on my father's _Essay on Government_.