Success Quote by Henri Poincare

Poincare is doing something quietly provocative here: he demotes "chance" from a force in the world to a confession about our eyesight. The line is built like a trap. It starts with what feels harmless - a "very small cause" - and ends with a "considerable effect" so loud we "cannot fail to see" it. The punch comes in the last clause: when we can't trace the chain, we baptize our ignorance as randomness. In other words, chance is often less an explanation than a label slapped onto complexity.

The intent is methodological, but the subtext is philosophical. Poincare is pushing back against the seductive comfort of deterministic storytelling after the fact: we notice outcomes, then retrofit causes. When the true cause is microscopic or buried in a dense system - a tiny measurement error, a subtle initial condition, a stray perturbation - our narratives default to "it just happened". He's warning that the human mind is an unreliable historian of causality, especially in systems where sensitivity amplifies the small into the spectacular.

Context matters: Poincare is writing at the turn of the 20th century, when classical physics still promised clockwork certainty, yet celestial mechanics and nonlinear dynamics were already revealing cracks. His work foreshadows what later gets popularized as chaos theory: deterministic systems can behave unpredictably because minute differences cascade. The quote works because it flips a common intuition. We treat chance as a property of events; Poincare treats it as a property of observers.