“In the chapter on Logic that considers the law of causality, John Stuart Mill affirms that the state of the universe at any instant is a consequence of its state at the previous instant and that for an infinite intelligence the perfect knowledge of a single instant would make it possible to know the history of the universe, both past and future. (He says also—oh Louis Auguste Blanqui, oh Nietzche, oh Pythagoras!—that the repetition of any one state of the universe would bring about the repetition of all the others and would make universal history a cyclical series.) In that tempered version of one of Laplace's fantasies—Laplace had imagined that the present state of the universe, in theory, could be reduced to a formula from which Someone would be able to deduce the whole future and whole past—Mill does not exclude the possibility that a future exterior intervention may break the series. He asserts that state q will inevitably produce state r; state r, s; state s, t; but he concedes that before t a divine catastrophe—the consummatio mundi, say—may have annihilated the planet. The future is inexorable, precise, but it may not happen. God lies in wait in the intervals.”
–J.L. Borges, The Creation and P.H. Gosse