Abstract

We shall realize better the strength of the general human belief in the idea of necessary connection, if we remember that it is as old as human speculative thought itself. We find it at the very dawn of Western thought, stated explicitly and unambiguously by Democritus: "By necessity are foreordained all things that were and are and are to come." Twenty-two centuries later Laplace in the famous and frequently quoted passage of his Théorie analytique de la probabilité expressed the same strictly deterministic view based on essentially the same corpuscular-kinetic conception of the universe as that of Democritus