"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."

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets ""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."" in the context of "Arthur Conan Doyle, in The Sign of Four (1890), Ch. 10, p. 137; this actually differs from Reade's remarks in his The Martyrdom of Man (1872), where he states: "As a single atom man is an enigma: as a whole he is a mathematical problem."" to mean that wisdom is timeless.