“Chaque homme porte la forme entiere de l’humaine condition.” #Montaigne

“Each man bears the entire form of man’s estate.” (Frame, 1957)

“Every man bears the whole Form of the human condition.” (Screech, 1991)

“Every man carries in himself the complete pattern of human nature.” (JM Cohen, 1958)

“Every man has in himself the whole form of human nature.” (Ives, 1925)

“Every man carries the entire form of human condition.” (Cotton, ed. Hazlitt, 1877)

“Every man beareth the whole stampe of humane condition.” (Florio, 1603)

“Voilà ce que la memoire m’en represente en gros, et assez incertainement. Tous jugemens en gros sont laches et imparfaicts.” #Montaigne

“That is what my memory of Tacitus offers me in gross, and rather uncertainly. All judgments in gross are loose and imperfect.” (Frame, 1957)

“That is, grosso modo, the Tacitus which is presented to me, vaguely enough, by my memory. All grosso-modo judgements are lax and defective.” (Screech, 1991)

“This is what my memory of Tacitus presents to me in a general way, and with no great certainty. All general judgements are weak and imperfect.” (JM Cohen, 1958)

“This is what my memory of Tacitus presents to me in gross and with much uncertainty. All general judgements are weak and imperfect.” (George Burnham Ives, 1925)

“This is what my memory presents to me in gross, and with uncertainty enough; all judgments in gross are weak and imperfect.” (Cotton, ed. Hazlitt, 1877)

“Loe here what my memory doth in grose, and yet very uncertainely present unto me of it. In breefe, all judgments are weake, demisse and imperfect.” (Florio, 1603)

Anyone who would aim straight at a cure and would reflect on it before taking any action, would be likely to cool off about setting his hand to it. Pacuvius Calavius corrected the error of this procedure by a signal example. His fellow citizens were in revolt against their magistrates. He, a person of great authority in the city of Capua, one day found means to lock up the Senate in the palace, and, calling the people together in the market place, told them that the day had come when in full liberty they could take vengeance on the tyrants who had so long oppressed them, and whom he held alone and disarmed at his mercy. He advised them that these men should be brought out one by one, by lot, and that they should decide about each one individually, and have their sentence executed on the spot; with this provision also, that at the same time they should decide to appoint some honorable man in the place of the condemned man, so that the office should not remain vacant. They had no sooner heard the name of one senator than there arose a cry of general dissatisfaction against him. “I see very well,” said Pacuvius, “that we must dismiss this one; he is a wicked man; let us have a good one in exchange.” There was a prompt silence, everyone being much at a loss whom to choose. The first man bold enough to name his choice met a still greater unanimity of voices to refuse him, citing a hundred imperfections and just causes for rejecting him. These contradictory humors having grown heated, it fared still worse with the second senator, and the third: as much disagreement about election as agreement about dismissal. Having tired themselves out uselessly in this dispute, they began bit by bit, one this way, one that, to steal away from the assembly, each one bearing away this conclusion in his mind, that the oldest and best-known evil is always more bearable than an evil that is new and untried. (Montaigne, Essays, III, 9)

Another source of mistakes in belief formation is selection bias. Patients in dialysis centers are often surprisingly reluctant to be on the waiting list for a kidney transplantation. One reason is that all the transplanted patients they ever see are those for whom the operation failed so that they had to go back on dialysis. Montaigne was citing a bias of this kind when he referred to Diagoras as being “shown many vows and votive portraits from those who have survived shipwrecks and… then asked, ‘You, there, who think that the gods are indifferent to human affairs, what have you to say about so many men saved by their grace?’ — ‘It is like this,’ he replied, ‘there are no portraits here of those who stayed and drowned — and they are more numerous!'” Similarly, a psychiatrist who claims that “no child abusers ever stop on their own” neglects the fact that if any does he is unlikely to have met them. (Jon Elster, Explaining Social Behavior)

“…the thought occurs that if fairness to all divisions of humanity requires their separate mention when referred to in the mass, then the listing must not read simply ‘men and women’, it must include teenagers. They have played a large role in the world and they are not clearly distinguished in the phrase ‘men and women.’ Reflection further shows that mention should be given to yet another group: children. The child prodigy in music is a small category. But one must not forget the far larger group of 8-, 10-, and 12-year olds: boys (and sometimes girls in disguise) who in the armies and navies of the West have served in fife-and-drum corps or as cabin boys. Columbus’s ships had a large contingent; all the great explorers of the New World relied on sizable teams of these hard-worked crew members.” (Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence)

Most social scientists conceive it as their exclusive task to discover and stress regularities, stable relationships, and uniform sequences. This is obviously an essential search, one in which no thinking person can refrain from participating. But in the social sciences there is a special room for the opposite type of endeavor: to underline the multiplicity and creative disorder of the human adventure, to bring out the uniqueness of a certain occurrence, and to perceive an entirely new way of turning a historical corner.

The coexistence as equals of the two types of activities just outlined is characteristic of the social sciences. In the natural sciences the unexplained phenomenon and alertness to it are also of the greatest importance, but only as a means to an end, as the beginning of a new search for an improved general theory which would subsume the odd fact, thus overcoming its recalcitrance and destroying it in its uniqueness. In the social sciences, on the other hand, it is not at all clear which is means and which is end: true, most social scientists behave in this respect as if they were natural scientists; but they would be more surprised than the latter and, above all, considerably distraught if their search for general laws were crowned with total success. Quite possibly, then, all the successive theories and models in the social sciences, and the immense efforts that go into them, are motivated by the noble, if unconscious, desire to demonstrate the irreducibility of the social world to general laws! In no other way would it have been possible to affirm so conclusively the social world as the realm of freedom and creativity. But by now there surely is something to be said for pursuing this theme in a less roundabout fashion.

The importance of granting equal rights of citizenship in social science to the search for general laws and to the search for uniqueness appears particularly in the analysis of social change. One way of dealing with this phenomenon is to look for “laws of change” on the basis of our understanding of past historical sequences. But the possibility of encountering genuine novelty can never be ruled out — this is indeed one of the principal lessons of the past itself. And there is a special justification for the direct search for novelty, creativity, and uniqueness: without these attributes change, at least large-scale social change, may not be possible at all. For, in the first place, the powerful social forces opposed to change will be quite proficient at blocking off those paths of change that have already been trod. Secondly, revolutionaries or radical reformers are unlikely to generate the extraordinary social energy they need to achieve change unless they are exhilaratingly conscious of writing an entirely new page of human history.

I have of course not been disinterested in claiming equal rights for an approach to the social world that would stress the unique rather than the general, the unexpected rather than the expected, and the possible rather than the probable. For the fundamental bent of my writings has been to widen the limits of what is or is perceived to be possible, be it at the cost of lowering our ability, real or imaginary, to discern the probable. (Hirschman, 1971, A Bias for Hope)

A Catalog of Montaigne’s Beam Inscriptions.

Arthur Krystal on Jacques Barzun.

Theodore Dalrymple Montaigne’s Humanity.