REVIEW OF LAPLACE, SUR LES PROBABILITÉS... Ir is to the imperfection of the human mind, and not to any irregularity in the nature of things, that our ideas of chance and probability are to be referred. Events which to one man seem accidental and precarious, to another, who is better informed, or who has more power of generalization, appear to be regular and certain. Contingency and verisimilitude are therefore the offspring of human ignorance, and, with an intellect of the highest order, cannot be supposed to have any existence. In fact, the laws of the material world have the same infallible operation on the minute and the great bodies of the universe; and the motions of the former are as determinate as those of the latter. There is not a particle of water or of air, of which the condition is not defined by rules * From the Edinburgh Review, Vol. XXIII. (1814.)—Ed. as certain as that of the sun or the planets, and that has not described from the beginning a trajectory determined by mechanical principles, subjected to the law of continuity, and capable of being mathematically defined. This trajectory is therefore in itself a thing knowable, and would be an object of science to a mind informed of all the original conditions, and possessing an analysis that could follow them through their various combinations. The same is true of every atom of the material world; so that nothing but information sufficiently extensive, and a calculus sufficiently powerful, is wanting to reduce all things to certainty, and, from the condition of the world, at any one instant to deduce its condition at the next; nay, to integrate the formula in which those momentary actions are included, and to express all the phenomena that ever have happened, or ever will happen, in a function of duration reckoned from any given instant. This is in truth the nearest approach that we can make to the idea of Omniscience; of the Wisdom which presides over the least as well as the greatest things; over the falling of a stone as well as the revolution of a planet; and which not only numbers and names the stars, but even the atoms that compose them. The farther, accordingly, that our knowledge has extended, the more phenomena have been brought from the dominion of Chance, and placed |
