Given for one instant an intelligence that could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated ... an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis ...

Given for one instant an intelligence that could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated ... an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis ... it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.