40 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP. 



past as calculable functions of thj_present x andjhus to 

 claim that all is given. On this hypothesis, past, 

 present and future would be open at a glance to a 

 superhuman intellect capable of making the calculation. 

 Indeed, the scientists who have believed in the 

 universality and perfect objectivity of mechanical 

 explanations have, consciously or unconsciously, acted 

 on a hypothesis of this kind. Laplace formulated it 

 with the greatest precision : &quot;An intellect which at a 

 given instant knew all the forces with which nature is 

 animated, and the respective situations of the beings 

 that compose nature supposing the said intellect were 

 vast enough to subject these data to analysis would 

 embrace in the same formula the motions of the 

 greatest bodies in the universe and those of the 

 slightest atom : nothing would be uncertain for it, and 

 the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes.&quot; 1 

 And Du Bois-Reymond : &quot; We can imagine the 

 knowledge of nature arrived at a point where the 

 universal process of the world might be represented by 

 a single mathematical formula, by one immense system 

 of simultaneous differential equations, from which 

 could be deduced, for each moment, the position, 

 direction, and velocity of every atom of the world.&quot; 2 

 Huxley has expressed the same idea in a more con 

 crete form : &quot; If the fundamental proposition of 

 evolution is true, that the entire world, living and not 

 living, is the result of the mutual interaction, according 

 to definite laws, of the forces possessed by the molecules 

 of which the primitive nebulosity of the universe was 

 composed, it is no less certain that the existing world 



1 Laplace, &quot;Introduction & la theorie analytique des probabilities&quot; 

 ((Euvres completes, vol. vii., Paris, 1886, p. vi.). 



2 Du Bois-Reymond, Uber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens t Leipzig, 

 1892 



