[3] Many variations on the analogy exist, and they have been variously attributed to several famous figures at different times (e.g. misquotations of Charles Darwin), but the quotation has been around since at least the 1890s.
[5] Wendy Doniger relates it to a French and English proverb: "In the dark, all cats are grey."
Hegel criticised naive ideas of the Absolute, which he ridiculed as "like a night, as people say, in which all cows are black."
Dashiell Hammett in The Dain Curse (1929) referred to a "blind man in a dark room hunting for a black hat that wasn't there".
Ernest Gellner referred to an East European joke about science, philosophy, and Marxism as looking for a cat in a dark room with various consequences: with science the cat is present, with philosophy absent, and with Marxism absent but found.