ABSTRACT
There would be little point in going into the various reasons for which Voltaire attacked Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis in a series of cruel pamphlets, derided him and, some say, hastened his death. In proposing the memory-prevision symmetry, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis emphasized that both our memories and our previsions are very imperfect, and suggested, on the other hand, that our anticipations are perfectible, just like our knowledge of the past. Montesquieu was wrong about the trend of his age: it was a faulty knowledge of the past-his own recent past-which led him to say: "The population of the earth decreases every day". The intellectual construction of a likely future is a work of art, in the full sense of the term, and this is what "conjecture" means here. The term "futuribles" is the label of an intellectual undertaking. A futurible is a futurum that appears to the mind as a possible descendant from the present state of affairs.
