Excerpt from The Essentials of American Constitutional Law:
But principles are not numerous. Possibly in Nature there is but one basic principle and all our so-called natural laws are but aspects of that principle as the human mind conceives or recognizes it. The analogy in government permits the asser tion that the principles of constitutional law are few. Possibly they are severally aspects of one principle: that of sovereignty. To the student of the law, especially to junior students, principles are matters of memory rather than of understanding. It is a vigorous and essentially mature mind that can reduce a complex issue to such simple form as to deduce the principle on which it rests.