ABSTRACT
Predicting the course of a person's development-his or her achievement, vocation, scope of impact, personal style-may not be a ridiculous indulgence of arrogance, but it comes awfully close. Understanding retrospectively a person's development is, on the surface, a more reasonable and doable task, but deceptively so. For such understanding we start with a sample of facts from which we deduce other facts and events, concluding from them plausible truths. And in doing so we paint what we think is an explanatory picture of why a person became what he or she is. The reason why there is more than one biography of an historical figure is that each biographer starts with a somewhat different sample of facts or interprets existing facts differently. Biographers differ about what are causes and what are effects.
