The doctrine of chances without chance

determinism, mathematical probability, and quantification in the seventeenth century

Lorraine Daston

pp. 27-50

in: Mary J. Nye, Joan L. Richards, Roger H. Stuewer (eds), The invention of physical science, Berlin, Springer, 1992

Abstract

All events, even those which on account of their insignificance do not seem to follow the great laws of nature, are a result of it just as necessarily as the revolutions of the sun ... Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it — an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis — it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of 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.1