The moment we leave past experience as the foundation of our conjectures concerning the future; and still more, if our conjectures absolutely contradict past experience, we are thrown upon a wide field of uncertainty, and any one supposition is then just as good as another.

— Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)

From the unrevised first edition (1798) of his Essay on the Principle of Population.

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