No piece of information is superior to any other

Casaubon’s rule, “No piece of information is superior to any other,” turns an indiscriminate archive into a method: retain everything, then search for connections. It gives practical form to the associative habit that underlies the Plan, while exposing the risk that a system determined to connect all things can mistake possibility for proof.

Origin in Casaubon’s Research Business

After finding work reading manuscripts and foreign books for little money, Casaubon accumulated experience and information and made a point of throwing nothing away. He kept files on everything. Instead of using a computer, as Jacopo Belbo was beginning to do, he organized his material on cross-referenced index cards.

The cards linked subjects through chains of association: nebulae led to Laplace, Laplace to Kant, Kant to Königsberg, and Königsberg to its seven bridges and topology. Casaubon likened the procedure to a word-association game in which a route could be traced from sausage to Plato through pig bristle, a paintbrush, Mannerism, and the Idea. Even a poor manuscript could yield twenty new cards, enlarging the archive without requiring that its contents first be judged important.

The Rule and Its Method

Casaubon describes the principle as a strict rule, one he associates with the practices of secret services: no information should be ranked above any other. Power comes from having everything on file and being able to find connections. The rule is therefore not simply an endorsement of collecting; it specifies a two-part procedure—preservation without prior selection, followed by relational discovery.

Its method treats the archive as open-ended. A card matters not only for what it says in isolation but also for the paths it may create toward other cards. The examples make the logic concrete: topology becomes available through a sequence of associations rather than through a planned investigation of topology itself. Casaubon’s confidence that connections are always there, if one wants to find them, gives the method its energy and its danger.

Relation to the Plan

The rule anticipates the Plan’s construction from materials gathered across disparate subjects. If no piece of information is excluded as inferior, almost any item can later be recruited into a larger pattern. The associative archive supplies a model for joining fragments; it also weakens the distinction between a connection that can be made and one that establishes a truth.

Casaubon first describes the practice as part of the work that sustains his small research business. After about two years, he is pleased with himself and enjoys the work; meanwhile, he has met Lia. In retrospect, the rule stands at an early point in his movement from collecting information to pursuing universal connections. Its central tension is already present: a complete file can preserve knowledge, but the desire to connect everything can make the search itself seem like confirmation.