The only safeguard he could find was in empiricism.
This hatred of abstraction is, of course, the basis of his earliest publication; but it remained with him to the end.

He would not discuss America in terms of right.

"I do not enter into these metaphysical distinctions," he said in the _Speech on American Taxation_, "I hate the very sound of them." "One sure symptom of an ill-conducted state," he wrote in the _Reflections_, "is the propensity of the people to resort to theories." "It is always to be lamented," he said in a _Speech on the Duration of Parliament_, "when men are driven to search into the foundations of the commonwealth." The theory of a social contract he declared "at best a confusion of judicial with civil principles," and he found no sense in the doctrine of popular sovereignty.

"The lines of morality," he said in the _Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs_ (1791), "are not like ideal lines of mathematics.

They are broad and deep as well as long.