38 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



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 pre- 

 cision: "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." 1 

 And Du Bois-Reymond : "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 differ- 

 ential equations, from which could be deduced, for each 

 moment, the position, direction, and velocity of every 

 atom of the world. " 2 Huxley has expressed the same idea 

 in a more concrete form: "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 

 lay, potentially, in the cosmic vapor, and that a sufficient 

 intellect could, from a knowledge of the properties of the 

 molecules of that vapor, have predicted, say the state of 

 the Fauna of Great Britain in 1869, with as much cer- 

 tainty as one can say what will happen to the vapor of 

 the breath in a cold winter's day." In such a doctrine, 



1 Laplace, Introduction a la theorie analytique des probabUitis (CEuvres 

 comptetes, vol. vii., Paris, 1886, p. vi.). 



2 Du Bois-Reymond, Vber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens, Leipzig, 

 1892. 



