“Mark this which I am going to say once for all: If I had not force enough to project a principle full in the face of the half dozen most obvious facts which seem to contradict it, I would think only in single file from this day forward.”

Holmes' critique of "single file" thinking foreshadows Fyodor Dostoevsky's attack, in an essay of October 1876, on what he called "the straight-line approach". See Dostoevsky, A Writer's Diary, Volume 1: 1873–1876 (Northwestern University Press, 1997), pp. 641–57, 721–29.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

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Oliver Wendell Holmes 135
Poet, essayist, physician 1809–1894

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