Procrustean bed

1787, Anna Seward, letter to Francis Noel Clarke Mundy dated 10 October, 1787, in Letters of Anna Seward, Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1811, Volume 1, p. 342, Merely to jingle common-place ideas in rhyme, may be easy enough; but to make fine sense, animated and appropriate description, and beautiful imagery, recline gracefully on that Procrustean bed, is about as easy as to compose music like Handel or Hedyen, and to paint like Reynolds, Romney, and Fuzeli.

And now began the real wrong-doing of the Trades’ Unions. As to their decision to work, or not, at such a particular rate of wages, that was either wise or unwise; all error of judgment at the worst. But they had no right to tyrannise over others, and tie them down to their own procrustean bed.

Iron-bound, impersonal ethics, the procrustean bed of rules, he soon saw at their true value as the deification of averages.

The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality.

[…] we shouldn’t try to mould or squeeze people into the procrustean bed of our popular conception of human virtue of the moment, but permit them as far as possible to develop along their own temperamental lines.

[…] but, as the authors had hinted in their discussion of Germany in the Manifesto, that such a conception is not a procrustean bed into which complex reality must be shoved.

The reductionist tendencies and impulses of Jaynes's approach tend to turn history into a Procrustean Bed; the body is mangled to fit the theory.