Excerpted from The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle, ©1890:
“Winwood Reade is good upon the subject,” said Holmes. “He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician."
It's interesting, because that was the basis for Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, written more than fifty years later.
Arthur Conan Doyle's books are in the public domain and may be downloaded or read online freely at Project Gutenberg, HERE.
William Winwood Reade was a real historian whose books are also in the public domain There are several sources for them listed at the bottom of his Wikipedia page, HERE.
Isaac Asimov's books are not in the public domain, but he died in 1992 and I have no moral qualms about pirating a book when it's not the author who gets the royalties.
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