Note (return) — Chapter IV

Bentham himself believed that he had found the standard in the fact that all men seek pleasure and avoid pain. In that respect men were measurable and comparable. Politics and jurisprudence could therefore be made experimental sciences in exactly the same sense as physics or chemistry. 'The present work,' wrote Bentham, 'as well as any other work of mine that has been or will be published on the subject of legislation or any other branch of moral science, is an attempt to extend the experimental method of reasoning from the physical branch to the moral.'[28]