298 THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE 



intellect might achieve in foretelling the future or describ- 

 ing the past. To one who carried the mechanical descrip- 

 tion of the universe forward by leaps and bounds, to 

 Laplace at the summit of his course of discovery, there 

 appeared a vision and he wrote it down in the material- 

 istic phrases of his age : — 



" We ought then to regard the present state of the 

 universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the 

 cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence which 

 should be acquainted with all the forces by which nature 

 is animated and with the several positions at any given 

 instant of all the parts thereof ; if, further, its intellect were 

 vast enough to submit these data to analysis, would include 

 in one and the same formula the movements of the largest 

 bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom. 

 Nothing would be uncertain for it, the future as well as 

 the past would be present to its eyes. The human mind, 

 in the perfection it has been able to give to astronomy, 

 affords a feeble outline of such an intelligence. Its dis- 

 coveries in mechanics and in geometry, joined to that of 

 universal gravitation, have brought it within reach of com- 

 prehending in the same analytical expressions the past 

 and future states of the systems of the world." ^ 



Only those who realise the enormous strides made by 

 applied mathematics in the age of Laplace, and have 

 tasted, even if in a small degree, the joy of scientific dis- 

 covery, can fairly judge such words. To treat them with 

 contumely as a " Laplacean conceit," and to join with 

 Napoleon — that waster of human intellectual power — in 

 declaring their writer as "fit for nothing but solving problems 

 in the infinitely little," ' is indeed to proclaim oneself a 

 dullard unable to appreciate some of the most marvellous 

 products of the human mind. If our mechanical descrip- 

 tion of the universe has not progressed at the rate Laplace 



1 Essai Philosophique siir les Probabilitds, p. 4. Paris, 18 19. Laplace 

 continues: "All its efforts in the search for truth cause it to continually 

 approach the intelligence we have just conceived, but from this intelligence 

 it will ever remain infinitely distant" The last words are often omitted by 

 those who cite the passage. 



2 James Ward : Naturalism and Agnosticism. London, 1899. 



