Excerpt from The Evidence of Things Not Seen: I. From Nature, II. From RevelationThese words of Laplace, if the anecdote be true, admit of various interpretations. He may have desired to convey the Opinion that the book in question, being a purely scientific work, was not concerned at all with final causes, or they may have been an expression of his idea that such final causes were quite beyond the reach of scientific knowledge, an attitude of mind which we should at present call Agnostic, or, lastly, they can be considered as the utterance of his conviction that no introduction of the notion of a Creator was necessary in connec tion with the study of Nature.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.