The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (350 page)

“You are confusing a number of different ideas,” said Isaac, “but this does at least prove that you
perused
my notes before
burning
them.”

At this Caroline was taken aback for a moment; then curiosity got the better of her. “What is this Agent or Spirit? Have you seen it, Sir Isaac?”

“I see it now, in the emotions and thoughts flickering across your face, highness. I see its
effect
everywhere,” was the somewhat evasive response of Newton. “In Nature I perceive two categories of actions:
mechanical
and
vegetable
. By
mechanical
I mean, of course, just the sort of thing that Drs. Waterhouse and Leibniz discoursed of earlier: in a word, clock-work. By
vegetable
I do not mean turnips. That is a new and vulgar meaning of the word. I use it in its ancient sense of something animate, living, growing. It describes generative and creative processes. Clocks, even good ones, run down and wear out. The mechanical world decays. Counterpoised against this tendency to decline must be some creative principle: the active seed—the Subtile Spirit. An unimaginably tiny quantity of this, acting upon a vastly larger bulk of insipid, dead, inactive matter, wreaks immense, even miraculous transformations, to which I give the general name
vegetation
. Just as the general principle of Gravity manifests itself in diverse specific ways, such as tides, the orbits of comets, and the trajectories of bullets, so the vegetative principle may be perceived, by those who know how to look for it, in diverse places. Just to mention one example, which we discoursed of earlier: a flying-machine, constructed of artificial muscles, would be a mechanical device, whose fate, I believe, would be to crash to the ground, like the corpse of a bird that has died on the wing. If that machine were to take flight—which would mean sensing every fluctuation of the air, and responding in the correct way—I should ascribe that, ultimately, to the workings of some sort of vegetative principle. But Daniel is correct in thinking that it is also related to such matters as
souls, miracles, and certain of the more profound and astonishing chymical transformations.”

“But do you think that there is ultimately some physical substance at work—something you could touch and observe?”

“Yes, I do, and have been searching for it. And I think I know where to find some,” Isaac said, and turned to glower at Daniel. But the Princess missed this, as she was turning to Leibniz. “Baron von Leibniz,” said she, “can your view be reconciled with Sir Isaac’s?”

Leibniz sighed. “It is…awkward,” he said. “To my ears, all of this sounds like a rear-guard action fought by a good Christian retreating before the onslaught of Mechanical Philosophy.”

“That could not be more wrong!” snapped Newton. “There is Mechanical, and there is Vegetable. I study both.”

“But you have already ceded half the battlefield to Mechanical!”

“There is no
ceding,
sir. Have you not read my
Principia
? The Mechanical world exists, the Mechanical philosophy describes it.”

“Dr. Waterhouse would say that Mechanism describes not just
half,
but
all
of it,” Leibniz said. “I take the opposite view, which is that Vegetable is all, and what we think of as mechanical is only the superficies of underlying processes that are not mechanical at all.”

“We await a coherent explanation,” said Isaac.

“Philosophers of a Mechanick frame of mind break all things down into atoms, to which they ascribe properties that, to them, seem reasonable—which means Mechanical properties. Mass, extension, and the ability to collide with and stick to one another. Then from this they try to explain Gravity and Souls and Miracles. It leads them into difficulties. Instead, I break all things down into
monads,
to which I ascribe what some would call soul-like properties: they can perceive, thnk about their perceptions, decide, and act. From this it is no great difficulty to explain those things that are so troublesome, in a mechanical-minded Atomic philosophy—everything that you put under the rubric of Vegetation, including our own ability to think, decide, and act. However, it is difficult to explain the things that are, in an Atomic philosophy, idiotically simple and obvious. Such as space and time.”

“Space and Time! Two minor omissions that no one is likely to notice,” grumbled Newton.

“If I may say so, your own conception of Space is by no means as straightforward as it seems at first,” Leibniz said, very much in the style of one who was firing the opening salvo of another long argument. But before this could get going, the door of the room opened, and Johann von Hacklheber could be seen standing there, holding,
in a very significant way, a Letter. Behind him Eliza was pacing back and forth with a fist balled up in front of her lips.

Princess Caroline stared into Johann’s eyes, and cocked her head. She did not say aloud
I told you not to bother me,
but it came through so distinctly that all heads turned back toward Johann, expecting from him an immediate apology. Instead he raised his eyebrows and stood his ground.

Caroline closed her eyes and sighed. Newton, Leibniz, and Waterhouse stepped back to clear her path out of the room. For they had all understood at the same moment that there was only one person who had this authority: Caroline’s father-in-law, the as-yet-uncrowned King of England.

“Dr. Waterhouse, pray accept the rôle of my knight-errant, and put this thing to rest,” she said, and swept out.

“Well! That’s a bit of a tall order,” Daniel reflected, after the door had been closed behind her.

“Not so,” said Newton, “if you’ll only release the Solomonic Gold.”

“That Jew who works for the Tsar,” said Daniel—not wishing to utter the name Solomon, for fear it would send Isaac into chiliastic transports—“has detected that the trial batch of plates were made of heavier-than-normal gold, and the decree has gone forth from the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg that
all
succeeding plates be made of the same stuff. If we disobey, punishment will ensue, in the
Russian
style. Were it not for this, I’d swop the gold without hesitation. For I believe it has no special properties whatsoever.”

“Then how do you explain your personal resurrection, at the hands of Enoch Root, in 1689?”

“Say
what
!?” asked Leibniz.

“Or,” said Isaac, “is that the one thing Hooke wrote, in all his life, that you’ll not believe?”

“Hooke’s account states that Enoch gave me some medicine, which helped.”

“
Helped!?
You have a marvelous gift for understatement, Daniel.”

“It could have been anything…or
nothing
. It has been known to occur that seemingly dead men will revive after a few minutes.”

“I hated Hooke,” Isaac admitted, “but even I will admit that he was the most acute observer who ever lived. Do you really expect me to believe that he, of all people, could not distinguish between a living patient and a dead?”

“I see that your mind is quite made up. What point is there in debating it?”

Both Newton and Leibniz laughed out loud.

“What is funny?” Daniel demanded.

“You have made
us
debate for hours!” Leibniz exclaimed. “Now that you are challenged on a troublesome question, you claim to see no point in it.”

“I need only a small sample, Daniel,” said Newton. “Do not forget that for many years I have sought evanescent traces of this in samples of gold that had been infinitely diluted and debased. My techniques are now highly developed. I do not need a brick of the stuff. Just an ounce, or less—a scrap.”

“I tell you that Peter’s assayer weighed every ounce of it. There are no ounces to spare. I could
ask
him for permission to take a small sample, but…”

“No,” said Isaac, “I do not think it would be wise for you to tip your hand.”

At this remark Daniel was suddenly conscious of the ring on his finger: the one that Solomon had given him, made of con-fused bits punched from the plates at Bridewell. A tingle ran up his arm to his scalp; but he froze there, and said nothing, and hoped that Isaac would not take note of his horripilation.

“Isaac,” said a voice. Daniel had to look up to verify that it was that of Leibniz: a bit shocking, only in that the German had addressed Newton by his Christian name, without the “Sir.”

“Gottfried,” said Newton, not to be gainsaid.

“Thirty-seven years ago I came
incognito
to these shores to propose an alliance between myself and you. It was about two years after I’d developed the calculus, only to realize I was only following in your footsteps. It had occurred to me that we might share other interests as well, and that by joining forces we might achieve more, sooner. Daniel had encouraged me in this.”

“I well remember the match, and the matchmaker,” said Isaac, “and his weakness for playing with matches.”

This witticism, because it was such a rare thing from Isaac, cut all the more deeply. Daniel’s right arm had begun to feel terribly heavy, as if the ring were weighing it down—or as if the strain of the day had caused him to suffer a stroke. He put the heavy hand in the pocket of his breeches, and hung his head.

“Then you remember as well as I that the match flared, only to fail,” said Gottfried. “Now I am back, certainly for the last time. Will you not reconsider, Isaac? Will you not obey your Princess—
my
Princess—and work with me, and lay a strong foundation beneath the System of the World?”

“I
am
and
have been
working on just that,” said Isaac. “Should I not ask
you,
Gottfried, if
you
would work with
me?
It might entail giving up
on monads, by the way. Ah, I see by your look that you have no thought of doing so.”

“The answer then is no.”

“The answer is
yes
. But it is a question of
timing,
sir. It is not for you, or me, or our Princess, to dictate how long it shall take, and when it shall be accomplished!
She
would have it settled
now
—today!
You
are likewise in a great hurry. For you are an old man—we are all old men—and fearful of running out of time. But this is neither here nor there. Nature will reveal her secrets at times of her own choosing, and has no thought of our convenience.
Principia Mathematica
might never have come about had Nature not sent a spate of comets our way in the 1680s, and so arranged their trajectories that we could make telling observations. It might be ten years, a hundred, or a thousand before she sends us the clew that will enable us to solve the riddles we have been speaking of today. Though the Gold of Solomon might be might be just that clew—I don’t know until I can inspect some of it.”

Daniel smiled. “You are infinitely patient, it seems, save where the Solomonic Gold is concerned. It is amusing. Of the three of us, I’m the only one who is convinced he is really going to die soon—both of you, Isaac and Gottfried, are believers in life æternal. Why don’t you have the courage of your convictions, and agree to re-convene the discussion a few centuries from now, or whenever there are sufficient
data
to resolve these issues philosophically?”

Which was a little bit of a cheap trick—forcing their hands thus, by challenging the sincerity of their religious convictions. But Daniel was exhausted, and could see that the thing was doomed, and wanted only to wind it up.

“I accept!” said Leibniz. “It is a sort of duel—a
philosophick
duel, to be settled, not with weapons, but with ideas, at a time and on a field yet to be chosen. I accept.” And he held out his hand toward Isaac.

“Then I’ll look for you on that field, sir,” said Newton. “Though our philosophies are so different that I do not really expect
both
of us can possibly be there; for
one
of us must be wrong.” He shook Leibniz’s hand.

“Every duellist needs a second,” said Leibniz. “Perhaps Daniel shall act in that capacity for both of us.”

Daniel snorted. “
Isaac
may believe I was resurrected, but I did not think
you
would hold with such beliefs, Gottfried. No, if you require seconds, it now seems that there are any number of immortal personages who shall be willing to show up on the appointed date, and hold your coats: for you, Gottfried, there is Enoch Root, and for you,
Isaac, that ancient Jew who works for the Tsar and calls himself Solomon.” And so he did not take his right hand from his pocket to shake hands with them, for the ring felt terribly heavy and obvious, and he had a sort of lurid phant’sy that Gottfried and Isaac would suddenly recognize it for what it was, and fall to scuffling over it.

“B
RR, MY FATHER-IN-LAW
is frightfully cross with me,” Caroline announced, “at least, if I have made sense of his letter correctly.” She had read through it three times as Johann and Eliza watched. Leicester House resounded with booming and dragging noises: the sound of Royal baggage being packed and positioned.

“So much time has passed, and so many things have occurred, since I claimed I was going away to that Schloß to recover from June’s traumas, that I had quite forgotten that his majesty was expecting me back. But now he seems to have figured out where I am.”

“Probably some intelligence reached him after our little adventure on the Thames,” Johann suggested. His discourse had been clipped and gloomy, and he’d been supporting his head on his fingertips—or perhaps that was self-administered massage. To Caroline, being bawled out by the King of England and Elector of Hanover might have been a trivial family dust-up, but for him it was a different matter.

“Very well,” said Caroline, “it’s back to Hanover I go, then.”

“Right!” said Johann, and got up and strode out. If anyone had had the temerity to stop him and ask him
why,
he’d have said he was off to do something ever so practical and important. But as both Caroline and Eliza understood perfectly well, the fact of the matter was that he had become so agitated that he’d go mad if he spent any more time sitting and talking.