h other for him to prophesy with any
approach to certainty that they will behave alike under like
circumstances.

How far has he the first power? How far can he abstract from the facts
of man's state qualities in respect of which men are sufficiently
comparable to allow of valid political reasoning?

On April 5th, 1788, a year before the taking of the Bastille John Adams,
then American Ambassador to England, and afterwards President of the
United States, wrote to a friend describing the 'fermentation upon the
subject of government' throughout Europe. '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. May not, asked Plato, this type be the
pattern--the 'idea'--of man formed by God and laid up 'in a heavenly
place'? If so, men would have attained to a valid science of politics
when by careful reasoning and deep contemplation they had come to know
that pattern. Henceforward all the fleeting and varying things of sense
would be seen in their due relation to the eternal and immutable
purposes of God.

Or the relation of man to God's purpose was thought of not as that
between the pattern and the copy, but as that between the mind of a
legislator as expressed in enacted law, and the individual instance to
which the law is applied. We can, thought Locke, by reflecting on the
moral facts of the world, learn God's law. That law confers on us
certain rights which we can plead in the Court of God, and from which a
valid political science can be deduced. We know our rights with the same
certainty that we know his law.

'Men,' wrote Locke, 'being all the workmanship of