Lesbian rule

[4]In the early modern period, the term was often used figuratively (as Aristotle had used it) to mean a pliant, flexible and accommodating principle of judgment[1] – sometimes with overtones that were positive, but on other occasions in a more pejorative sense.

[6] In the later 17th century, the antiquary John Aubrey used the metaphor to imply the distortion of evidence to fit a preconceived theory.

[7] In Giambattista Vico's 1708 oration De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, a contribution to the evolving public debate about the advantages and disadvantages of the early modern academic system compared to that of the classical period (the "Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns"), Vico invokes the notion of the Lesbian rule to describe what is lacking in the modern system's intense focus on the mechanistic precision of the developing natural sciences: Since, then, the course of action in life must consider the importance of the single events and their circumstances, it may happen that many of these circumstances are extraneous and trivial, some of them bad, some even contrary to one's goal.

It is therefore impossible to assess human affairs by the inflexible standard of abstract right; we must rather gauge them by the pliant Lesbic rule, which does not conform bodies to itself, but adjusts itself to their contours.

[8]In the 19th century, John Henry Newman invokes the Lesbian rule in the introduction to Part I of his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845).