The Taming of Chance was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the 100 most important non-fiction books of the 20th century in English. Ian Hacking shows how, in the late 19th century, it became possible to regard statistical patterns as self-explanatory and the world as not necessarily deterministic. In the same period the notion of human nature was replaced by a model of the normal person based on the laws of dispersion. These two parallel transformations reinforced one another and shaped the modern conception of probability and statistical reasoning.