Quicksilver (41 page)

“You said you wanted to carry Wilkins’s work forward, Doctor.
Which
of his projects were you referring to? Flying to the moon, or—”

“The Philosophical Language,” Leibniz said, as if this should have been obvious.

He knew that Daniel had been involved in that project, and seemed to take the question as a sign that Daniel wasn’t especially proud of it—which was true. Noting Leibniz’s respect for the project, Daniel felt a stab of misgivings that perhaps the Philosophical Language had some wonderful properties that he had been too stupid to notice.

“What more is there to be done with it?” Daniel asked. “You have some refinements—additions—? You wish to translate the work into German—? You’re shaking your head, Doctor—what is it, then?”

“I was trained as a lawyer. Don’t look so horrified, Mr. Water-house, it is respectable enough, for an educated man in Germany. You must remember that we don’t have a Royal Society. After I was awarded my Doctor of Jurisprudence, I went to work for the
Archbishop of Mainz, who gave me the job of reforming the legal code—which was a Tower of Babel—Roman and Germanic and local common law all mangled together. I concluded that there was little point in jury-rigging something. What was needed was to break everything down into certain basic concepts and begin from first principles.”

“I can see how the Philosophical Language would be useful in breaking things down,” Daniel said, “but to build them back up, you would need something else—”

“Logic,” Leibniz said.

“Logic has a dismal reputation among the higher primates in the Royal Society—”

“Because they associate it with the Scholastic pedants who tormented them in university,” Leibniz said agreeably. “I’m not talking about
that
sort of thing! When I say logic, I mean Euclidean.”

“Begin with certain axioms and combine them according to definite rules—”

“Yes—and build up a system of laws that is as provable, and as internally consistent, as the theory of conic sections.”

“But you have recently moved to Paris, have you not?”

Leibniz nodded. “Part of the same project. For obvious reasons, I need to improve my knowledge of mathematics—what better place for it?” Then his face got a distracted, brooding look. “Actually there was
another
reason—the Archbishop sent me as an emissary, to tender a certain proposal to Louis XIV.”

“So today is not the first time you have combined Natural Philosophy with Diplomacy—”

“Nor the last, I fear.”

“What was the proposal you set before the King?”

“I only got as far as Colbert, actually. But it was that, instead of invading her
neighbors,
La France ought to make an expedition to Egypt, and establish an Empire there—creating a threat to the Turk’s left flank—Africa—and forcing him to move some armies away from his right flank—”

“Christendom.”

“Yes.” Leibniz sighed.

“It sounds—er—audacious,” Daniel said, now on a diplomatic mission of his own.

“By the time I’d arrived in Paris, and secured an appointment with Colbert, King Louis had already flung his invasion-force into Holland and Germany.”

“Ah, well—’twas a fine enough idea.”

“Perhaps some
future
monarch of France will revive it,” Leibniz
said. “For the Dutch, the consequences were dire. For me, it was fortuitous—no longer straining at
diplomatic
gnats, I could go to Colbert’s house in the Rue Vivienne and grapple with
philosophick
giants.”

“I’ve given up trying to grapple with them,” Daniel sighed, “and now only dodge their steps.”

They rambled all the way down to the Strand and sat down in a coffee-house with south-facing windows. Daniel tilted the arith-metickal engine toward the sun and inspected its small gears. “Forgive me for asking, Doctor, but is this
purely
a conversation-starter, or—?”

“Perhaps you should go back and ask Wilkins.”

“Touché.”

Now some sipping of coffee.

“My Lord Chester spoke correctly—in a way—when he said that Hooke could build this,” Daniel said. “Only a few years ago, he was a creature of the Royal Society, and he
would
have. Now he’s a creature of London, and he has artisans build most of his watches. The only exceptions, perhaps, are the ones he makes for the King, the Duke of York, and the like.”

“If I can explain to Mr. Hooke the importance of this device, I’m confident he’ll undertake it.”

“You don’t understand Hooke,” Daniel said. “Because you are German, and because you have diverse foreign connections, Hooke will assume you are a part of the Grubendolian cabal—which in his mind looms so vast that a French invasion of Egypt would be only a corner of it.”

“Grubendol?” Leibniz said. Then, before Daniel could say it, he continued, “I see—it is an anagram for Oldenburg.”

Daniel ground his teeth for a while, remembering how long it had taken
him
to decipher the same anagram, then continued: “Hooke is convinced that Oldenburg is stealing his inventions—sending them overseas in encrypted letters. What is worse, he saw you disembarking at the Bridge, and being handed a letter by a known Dutchman. He’ll want to know what manner of Continental intrigues you’re mixed up in.”

“It’s not a secret that my patron is the Archbishop of Mainz,” Leibniz protested.

“But you said you were a Lutheran.”

“And I am—but one of the Archbishop’s objectives is to reconcile the two churches.”

“Here
we say there are
more
than two,” Daniel reminded him.

“Is Hooke a religious man?”

“If you mean ‘does he go to church,’ then no,” Daniel admitted, after some hesitation. “But if you mean ‘does he believe in God’ then I should say yes—the Microscope and Telescope are his stained-glass windows, the animalcules in a drop of his semen, or the shadows on Saturn’s rings, are his heavenly Visions.”

“Is he like Spinoza, then?”

“You mean, one who says God is nothing more than Nature? I doubt it.”

“What does Hooke want?”

“He is busy all day and night designing new buildings, surveying new streets—”

“Yes, and I am busy overhauling the German legal code—but it is not what I
want
.”

“Mr. Hooke pursues various schemes and intrigues against Oldenburg—”

“But surely not because he
wants
to?”

“He writes papers, and lectures—”

Leibniz scoffed. “Not a tenth of what he knows is written down, is it?”

“You must keep in mind, about Hooke, that he is poorly understood, partly because of his crookedness and partly because of his difficult personal qualities. In a world where many still refuse to believe in the Copernican Hypothesis, some of Hooke’s more forward ideas would be considered grounds for imprisonment in Bedlam.”

Leibniz’s eyes narrowed. “Is it Alchemy, then?”

“Mr. Hooke despises Alchemy.”

“Good!” Leibniz blurted—most undiplomatically. Daniel covered a smile with his coffee-cup. Leibniz looked horrified, fearing that Daniel might be an Alchemist himself. Daniel put him at ease by quoting from Hooke: “‘Why should we endeavour to discover Mysteries in that which has no such thing in it? And like Rabbis find out Cabalism, and ænigmas in the Figure, and placing of Letters, where no such thing lies hid: whereas in natural forms…the more we magnify the object, the more excellencies and mysteries do appear; and the more we discover the imperfections of our senses, and the Omnipotency and Infinite perceptions of the great Creator.’”

“So Hooke believes that the secrets of the world are to be found in some microscopic process.”

“Yes—snowflakes, for example. If each snowflake is unique, then why are the six arms of a
given
snowflake the same?”

“If we assume that the arms grew outwards from the center, then there must be something in that center that imbues each of
the six arms with the same organizing principle—just as all oak trees, and all lindens, share a common nature, and grow into the same general shape.”

“But to speak of some mysterious
nature
is to be like the Scholastics—Aristotle dressed up in a doublet,” Daniel said.

“Or in an Alchemist’s robe—” Leibniz returned.

“Agreed. Newton would argue—”

“That fellow who invented the telescope?”

“Yes. He would argue that if you could catch a snowflake, melt it, and distill its water, you could extract some essence that would be the embodiment of its nature in the physical world, and account for its shape.”

“Yes—that is a good
distillation,
as it were, of the Alchemists’ mental habit—which is to believe that anything we cannot understand must have some physical residue that can in principle be refined from coarse matter.”

“Mr. Hooke, by contrast, is convinced that Nature’s ways are consonant to man’s reason. As the beating of a fly’s wings is consonant to the vibration of a plucked string, so that the sound of one, produces a sympathetic resonance in the other—in the same way, every phenomenon in the world can, in principle, be understood by human ratiocination.”

Leibniz said, “And so with a sufficiently powerful microscope, Hooke might peer into the core of a snowflake at the moment of its creation and see its internal parts meshing, like gears of a watch made by God.”

“Just so, sir.”

“And this is what Hooke
wants?
”

“It is the implicit goal of all his researches—it is what he
must
believe and
must
look for, because that is the nature of Hooke.”

“Now
you
are talking like an Aristotelian,” Leibniz jested.

Then he reached across the table and put his hand on the box, and said something that was apparently quite serious. “What a watch is to
time,
this engine is to
thought
.”

“Sir! You show me a few gears that add and multiply numbers—well enough. But this is not the same as
thought!
”

“What is a number, Mr. Waterhouse?”

Daniel groaned. “How can you ask such questions?”

“How can you
not
ask them, sir? You are a philosopher, are you not?”

“A Natural Philosopher.”

“Then you must agree that in the
modern
world, mathematicks is at the heart of Natural Philosophy—it is like the mysterious
essence in the core of the snowflake. When I was fifteen years old, Mr. Waterhouse, I was wandering in the Rosenthal—which is a garden on the edge of Leipzig—when I decided that in order to be a Natural Philosopher I would have to put aside the old doctrine of substantial forms and instead rely upon Mechanism to explain the world. This led me inevitably to mathematicks.”

“When I was fifteen, I was handing out Phanatiqual libels just down the street from here, and dodging the Watch—but in time, Doctor, as Newton and I studied Descartes at Cambridge, I came to share your view concerning the supreme position of mathematics.”

“Then I repeat my question: What is a number? And what is it to multiply two numbers?”

“Whatever it is, Doctor, it is different from
thinking
.”

“Bacon said, ‘Whatever has sufficient differences, perceptible by the sense, is in nature competent to express cogitations.’ You cannot deny that numbers are in that sense competent—”

“To
express
cogitation, yes! But to
express
cogitations is not to
perform
them, or else quills and printing-presses would write poetry by themselves.”

“Can your mind manipulate this spoon directly?” Leibniz said, holding up a silver spoon, and then setting it down on the table between them.

“Not without my hands.”

“So, when you think about the spoon, is your mind manipulating the spoon?”

“No. The spoon is unaffected, no matter what I think about it.”

“Because our minds cannot manipulate physical objects—cup, saucer, spoon—instead they manipulate
symbols
of them, which are stored in the mind.”

“I will accept that.”

“Now, you yourself helped Lord Chester devise the Philosophical Language, whose chief virtue is that it assigns all things in the world positions in certain tables—positions that can be encoded by numbers.”

“Again, I agree that numbers can
express
cogitations, through a sort of encryption. But
performing
cogitations is another matter entirely!”

“Why? We add, subtract, and multiply numbers.”

“Suppose the number three represents a chicken, and the number twelve the Rings of Saturn—what then is three times twelve?”

“Well, you can’t just do it at
random,
” Leibniz said, “any more than Euclid could draw lines and circles at random, and come up
with theorems. There has to be a formal system of rules, according to which the numbers are combined.”

“And you propose building a machine to do this?”

“
Pourquoi non?
With the aid of a machine, truth can be grasped as if pictured on paper.”

“But it is still not thinking. Thinking is what angels do—it is a property given to Man by God.”

“How do you suppose God gives it to us?”

“I do not pretend to know, sir!”

“If you take a man’s brain and distill him, can you extract a mysterious essence—the divine presence of God on Earth?”

“That is called the Philosophick Mercury by Alchemists.”

“Or, if Hooke were to peer into a man’s brain with a good enough microscope, would he see tiny meshings of gears?”

Daniel said nothing. Leibniz had imploded his skull. The gears were jammed, the Philosophick Mercury dribbling out his ear-holes.

“You’ve already sided with Hooke, and against Newton, concerning snowflakes—so may I assume you take the same position concerning brains?” Leibniz continued, now with exaggerated politeness.

Daniel spent a while staring out the window at a point far away. Eventually his awareness came back into the coffee-house. He glanced, a bit furtively, at the arithmetical engine. “There is a place in
Micrographia
where Hooke describes the way flies swarm around meat, butterflies around flowers, gnats around water—giving the
semblance
of rational behavior. But he thinks it is all because of internal mechanisms triggered by the peculiar vapors arising from meat, flowers,
et cetera
. In other words, he thinks that these creatures are no more rational than a trap, where an animal seizing a piece of bait pulls a string that fires a gun. A savage watching the trap kill the animal might suppose it to be rational. But the
trap
is not rational—the man who
contrived
the trap is. Now, if you—the ingenious Dr. Leibniz—contrive a machine that gives the
impression
of thinking—is it
really
thinking, or merely reflecting your genius?”