A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities
Original French Essai philosophique sur les probabilités, 1814. This edition is the Truscott & Emory English translation, 1902 (Project Gutenberg #58881).
Quotes
We ought then to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its anterior state and as the cause of the one which is to follow. 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 curve described by a simple molecule of air or vapor is regulated in a manner just as certain as the planetary orbits; the only difference between them is that which comes from our ignorance.
Probability is relative, in part to this ignorance, in part to our knowledge.