'Is Government a science or not ?' he describes men as asking.

'Are there any principles on which it is founded?
What are its ends?
If indeed there is no rule, no standard, all must be accident and chance.

If there is a standard, what is it ?'[25] [25] _Memoir of T.Brand Hollis_, by J.Disney, p.

32.
Again and again in the history of political thought men have believed themselves to have found this 'standard,' this fact about man which should bear the same relation to politics which the fact that all things can be weighed bears to physics, and the fact that all things can be measured bears to geometry.
Some of the greatest thinkers of the past have looked for it in the final causes of man's existence.

Every man differed, it is true, from every other man, but these differences all seemed related to a type of perfect manhood which, though few men approached, and none attained it, all were capable of conceiving.