"I hope that by these considerations the world will come to know that, if other nations have navigated more than we, we have not studied less than they; and that our returning to assert the Earth's stability and to take the contrary only for a mathematical fantasy, proceeds not from lack of acquaintance with others' ideas thereof but... from those reasons that piety, religion, the knowledge of the Divine Omnipotence, and a consciousness of the incapacity of man's understanding dictate to us."