If I order two new-laid eggs for breakfast, up come two unhatched but still unique avian individuals, and the chances are they serve my rude physiological purpose.'[38] [38] _A Modern Utopia_, p.

381.
To the politician, however, the uniqueness of the individual is of enormous importance, not only when he is dealing with 'philosophy and wide generalisations' but in the practical affairs of his daily activity.

Even the fowl-breeder does not simply ask for 'two eggs' to put under a hen when he is trying to establish a new variety, and the politician, who is responsible for actual results in an amazingly complicated world, has to deal with more delicate distinctions than the breeder.

A statesman who wants two private secretaries, or two generals, or two candidates likely to receive equally enthusiastic support from nonconformists and trade-unionists, does not ask for 'two men.' On this point, however, most writers on political science seem to suggest that after they have described human nature as if all men were in all respects equal to the average man, and have warned their readers of the inexactness of their description, they can do no more.

All knowledge of individual variations must be left to individual experience.
John Stuart Mill, for instance, in the section on the Logic of the Moral Sciences at the end of his _System of Logic_ implies this, and seems also to imply that any resulting inexactness in the political judgments and forecasts made by students and professors of politics does not involve a large element of error.
'Excepting,' he says, 'the degree of uncertainty, which still exists as to the extent of the natural differences of individual minds, and the physical circumstances on which these may be dependent, (considerations which are of secondary importance when we are considering mankind in the average or _en masse_), I believe most competent judges will agree that the general laws of the different constituent elements of human nature are even now sufficiently understood to render it possible for a competent thinker to deduce from those laws, with a considerable approach to certainty, the particular type of character which would be formed, in mankind generally, by any assumed set of circumstances.'[39] [39] _System of Logic_, Book vi.