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Updated: July 22, 2025
"I see," said M. de Laplace to me, "that it is useless to struggle against young people; I acknowledge that the man who is called the great elector of the Academy is more powerful than I am." "No," replied I; "M. Arago can only succeed in counterbalancing the opinion justly preponderating for M. de Laplace, when the right is found to be without possible contradiction on his side."
The style is often extremely obscure, and the author frequently leaves great gaps in his argument, to the sad discomfiture of his reader. Nor does it mend matters to say, as Laplace often does say, that it is "easy to see" how one step follows from another. Such inferences often present great difficulties even to excellent mathematicians.
Another of these elements is the new view of nature and of man's relation to nature. Certain notable discoveries in physics and astronomy had proved possible of combination with traditional religion, as in the case of Newton. Or again, they had proved impossible of combination with any religion, as in the case of Laplace.
Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer were the Joshuas who led the chosen people into the land which more than one venturous Moses had already dimly descried afar off from the Pisgah top of the eighteenth century. Kant and Laplace came first in time, as astronomy comes first in logical order. Stars and suns, and planets and satellites, necessarily precede in development plants and animals.
He began by saying that these modern views were of far more practical use to men of science than that of Laplace, and that they give us a history of the world consistent with the actual records of geology.
This numerical coincidence, which is perfectly accurate, would be one of the most mysterious phenomena in the system of the universe if Laplace had not proved that the law need only have been approximate at the origin, and that the mutual action of the satellites has sufficed to render it rigorous.
"Doubtless the Minister of Public Instruction was influenced by these considerations, when upon the occasion of a new edition of the works of Laplace having become necessary, he demanded of you to substitute the great French family for the personal family of the illustrious geometer. We give our full and unreserved adhesion to this proposition.
Full justice is done to Kant, as the originator of that "cosmic gas theory," as the Germans somewhat quaintly call it, which is commonly ascribed to Laplace.
"Even you, M. de Laplace, when you entered the Academy, had done nothing brilliant; you only gave promise. Your grand discoveries did not come till afterwards." Lagrange was the only man in Europe who could with authority address such an observation to him.
"Sir, do you recollect the reply of Laplace, when Napoleon asked him why there was no mention of God in his 'Mécanique Celeste? 'Sire, je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse. I was not sufficiently insane to base my religion of beauty upon a holiness that was buried in the tomb supplied by Joseph of Arimathea, that was long ago hunted out of the world it might have purified.
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