ABSTRACT
“For man, there is never gain without loss, and no loss without gain … Compensation everywhere”—this proposition, advanced by Formey in 1759 (p. 381), already anticipates what Emerson (1900), more than a century later, came to denote as the “sublime law” of life: the compensatory balance of give and take, of winning and losing, of excesses and defects. Before we turn to the recent resurgence of this idea in developmental psychology, a brief historical sidestep seems appropriate. Etymologically, the concept of compensation refers to the activity of counterbalancing weights to achieve an equilibrium. In the 18th century, the concept of compensation became associated with notions of harmony, perfection, justice, and stability, and it was used as an explanatory principle in such diverse fields as economics, biology, physics, mechanics, law, military science, ethics, aesthetics, and theology (cf. Svagelski, 1981). Leibniz (1710) referred to a principle of compensation in his attempt to prove that our world, despite all obvious evils, is the best of all possible worlds. Buffon’s (1760) comprehensive system of natural history largely centered on the notion of compensation as an organizing principle of animate and inanimate nature. In his famous essay on the roots of language, Herder (1772) speculated that language originates from the necessity to compensate for the adaptive deficiencies that characterize humans in comparison to animals.
