Il est facile de voir que... - Pierre-Simon Laplace

Comment, vous faites tout le système du monde, vous donnez les lois de toute la création et dans tout votre livre vous ne parlez pas une seule fois de l'existence de Dieu !

Let us recall that formerly, and at no remote epoch... all the unusual phenomena were regarded as so many signs of celestial wrath.

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. The human mind offers, in the perfection which it has been able to give to astronomy, a feeble idea of this intelligence. Its discoveries in mechanics and geometry, added to that of universal gravity, have enabled it to comprehend in the same analytical expressions the past and future states of the system of the world.