The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (349 page)

“Well, if you put it that way, it’s an old problem,” said Leibniz. “Descartes saw straight away that Mechanical Philosophy might spell trouble for free will, in that it led to a new sort of predestinationism—
not
rooted in theology, like that of the Calvinists, but rather growing out of the simple fact that matter obeys predictable laws.”

“Yes,” said Daniel, “and then he got it all wrong, by putting the soul in the pineal gland.”

“I’d rather say he got it wrong
before
then, by dividing the universe into matter, and cogitation,” Leibniz said.

“And I’d say he got it wrong even before then, by supposing that there was a problem,” said Newton. “There’s nothing wrong in recognizing that part of the universe is a passive mechanism, and part of it is active and thinking. But Monsieur Descartes, seeing what was done to Galileo by the Papists, was in such terror of the Inquisition that his resolve failed.”

“Very well, in any case we agree that Descartes perceived a problem, and came up with a wrong answer,” said Daniel. “Does either of you have a better one to offer up? Sir Isaac, it sounds as if you deny the very
existence
of any such problem.”

“You may read
Principia Mathematica
without finding discourse of souls, spirits, cogitation, or what-have-you,” said Isaac. “It is about planets, forces, gravity, and geometry. I do not address, and certainly
do not pretend to solve, the riddles that so confounded Monsieur Descartes. Why should we attempt to frame hypotheses about such matters?”

“Because if
you
do not, Sir Isaac, others, of less brilliance, will; and they will frame the wrong ones,” Caroline said.

Newton bristled. “My work on gravity and opticks has brought me a kind of fame, which is a thing I never sought, nor wanted. It has done me nothing good, and much bad—as now, when I am expected to utter profundities on topics far afield from what I have chosen to study.”

“So says the public Sir Isaac Newton,” said Daniel, “Author of
Principia Mathematica,
and Master of the Mint. But this is a private gathering, which might benefit from the participation of the
private
Sir Isaac: the author of the
Praxis
.”

“
Praxis
has not been published,” Isaac pointed out, “and not because I have deemed it somehow
private
but because ’tis yet unfinished, and so not fit to talk of.”

“What is
Praxis
?” Caroline inquired.

“What
Principia Mathematica
was to Mechanical Philosophy,
Praxis
would be to Alchemy,” said Isaac.

“A laconic answer! May we hear more?”

“If I may say so, highness,” said Daniel, “Sir Isaac learned early that anything he openly professed was liable to come under attack, to his great aggravation and embarrassment, and so became chary of professing anything until he had got it perfect, and made it impervious.
Praxis
is not ready yet.”

“Then it seems I shall not have any satisfaction whatsoever!” said Caroline, a bit poutingly.

“Which is entirely my fault, for having mentioned
Praxis,
” Daniel hastened to say. “But I had a reason for doing it, which was to say that, though
the public
Sir Isaac might profess not to see the problem that so captured the attention of Descartes, I believe that
the private
Sir Isaac has been working on just that problem.”

“As I state quite plainly in
Principia Mathematica,
” said Isaac, in a bit of a high clarion self-righteous tone, “it is not my intention, in that work, to consider the causes and seats of Force. That gravity exists, and acts at a distance, is taken as a given. Why and how it does so are not considered. I would not be human if I did not have some curiosity as to what gravity was, and how it works; and even if ’twere otherwise, Baron von Leibniz and his Continental supporters would never allow me a moment’s peace on the matter. So, yes! I would understand Force. I have toiled at it. The ignorant have styled my toils Alchemy.”

At this Daniel threw him an irritated look, which Isaac, to his credit, did not fail to notice.
“C’est juste!”
Isaac said. “It’s not
wrong
to call this work Alchemy, but that word, so laden with the baggage of centuries, doesn’t do justice to it.”

“May I ask a question about your research in this area—however you choose to denote it?” Leibniz asked.

“Provided it contains no hidden barbs or spryngs,” Isaac allowed.

Leibniz now achieved the difficult feat of rolling his eyes, heaving a great sigh of exasperation, and voicing his question all at the same time. “If I understand what ‘force’ means, in your metaphysicks—”

“Which is the only coherent definition of ‘force’ that I know of!” Newton slipped in, glancing at the Princess.

Leibniz, with some visible straining, affected a saintly mien during this. “It appears to mean some invisible influence, acting across what you think of as the vacuum of space at infinite speed, which causes objects to accelerate—even though nothing seems to be touching them.”

“Setting aside your strangely hedged and qualified way of talking about ‘vacuum’ and ‘space,’ that is a reasonable description of gravitational force,” Newton allowed.

“Now in your metaphysicks—which I concede happens to be that used by just about everyone—there is this thing called space, which is mostly empty, but has lumpy bits here and there, called bodies; some big heavy spherical ones which we call planets, but also any amount of clutter, such as this poker, yonder candelabrum, the rug, and these bipedal animated bodies answering to the names Daniel Waterhouse, Princess Wilhelmina Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach,
et cetera
?”

“That much is so obvious that some of us are amazed to hear a learned man waste breath pointing it out,” said Newton.

“Some of those bodies answer only to the deterministic laws of the mechanical philosophy,” said Leibniz, “such as the globe, which rolled into the fireplace because her royal highness gave it a shove. But the bodies denominated Daniel Waterhouse,
et cetera
, are somehow different. True, they are subject to the same forces as the globe—our friend Daniel plainly feels Gravity’s pull, or else he would float away! But such bodies act in complicated ways not explainable by the laws set forth in your
Principia Mathematica
. When Dr. Waterhouse sits down to write an essay, let us say about the
Latitudinarian
philosophy espoused by him and the late Mr. Locke, we may observe his quill maneuvering all over the page in the most complicated paths imaginable. Here are none of the conic sections of the
Principia
! No equation can predict the trajectory of Daniel’s nib over the
page, for it results from innumerable and unfathomable minute contractions of the small muscles of his fingers and his hand. If we dissect a man’s hand, we find that these muscles are governed by nerves, which may easily enough be traced back to the brain, as rivers come from springs in the mountains. Remove the brain, or sever its connexions to the hand, and lo, that limb becomes as simple as yonder globe; that is, we may predict its future movements from the
Principia,
and plot them in Conics. And so it is evident that, to the Force of Gravity—which acts on everything—are superadded other forces, observable only in animals,
*
and productive of infinitely more complicated and interesting movements.”

“I am with you so far,” said Newton, “if all you are saying is that forces other than Gravity act on Dr. Waterhouse’s pen when he is writing something, and that such forces do not appear to motivate rocks or comets.”

“Hooke was fascinated by muscles,” Daniel put in, “and looked at them under his microscope, and labored at making artificial ones, so that he could fly.
Those,
I predict, could have been described by Mechanical Philosophy; after all, they were naught more than practical applications of the Rarefying Engine, and as such, subject to Boyle’s Law. With more time and better microscopes, Hooke might have found, within muscles, tiny mechanisms, likewise describable by mathematical laws, and thereby put to rest any supposed mysteries—”

But he stopped as both Newton and Leibniz were making the same sort of hand-waving gestures employed to bat away farts. “You miss the point!” said Leibniz. “I have no interest in the physics of muscles! Think, sir, if Hooke had made his flying-machine, driven, in a deterministic fashion, by Rarefying Engines, what more then would he have had to add to this device, to make it flutter to a safe perch atop the cupola of Bedlam, and balance there as ’twas buffeted by divers wind-gusts, and take flight again without o’ersetting and tumbling to the ground like a shot squab? I am trying to draw our attention to what it is that comes down those nerves from the brain: the
decisions,
or rather, the physical manifestations thereof—the characters, as it were, in which they are writ—and transmitted to the muscles, that they may
inform
what would otherwise be without form and void.”

“I understand that,” said Daniel, “and I say it is all pistons and cylinders, weights and springs, to the very top. And that’s all I need to
explain how I inform ink on a page, and how a bird informs the air with its wings.”

“And I agree with you!” said Leibniz.

This produced a dumbfounded pause. “Have I converted you to the doctrine of Materialism so easily, then?” Daniel inquired.

“By no means,” said Leibniz. “I say only that, though the machine of the body obeys deterministic laws,
it does so in accordance with the desires and dictates of the soul,
because of the pre-established harmony.”

“Of that, we must needs hear more, for it is very difficult to understand,” said the Princess.

“Chiefly because it is
wrong
!” said Sir Isaac.

Caroline now had to literally step between the two philosophers. “Then we are all in agreement that further discourse concerning the pre-established harmony is wanted from Baron von Leibniz,” she said. “But first, I would fain hear Sir Isaac address the phænomena of which Drs. Waterhouse and Leibniz have just been discoursing. Sir Isaac, we have heard from both of these gentlemen that they are wholly satisfied it is all mechanism to the very top. What of you? Do you require something more?”

Newton said, “If we allow, not only the muscles, but the nerves, and even the brain itself, to be ‘pistons and cylinders, weights and springs’ as you put it, whose machinations might be observed and described by some future Hooke, then we must still explain how those mechanisms are informed by the soul, spirit, or whatever we are going to call it—the thing that has free will, that is not subject to deterministic laws, and that accounts for our being human. This is ultimately the same problem as we discoursed of earlier—the problem
you
find boring, Daniel—of God’s relationship to the Universe. For the relationship that our souls bear to our bodies, is akin to the relationship that God bears to the entire Universe. If God is to be something more than an Absentee Landlord—something more than the perfect watch-maker, who sets His clock a-run, and walks away from it—then we must account for how He influences the movements of things in the world. This gets us round to that mysterious phænomenon called Force. And when we discourse of animal motion we must in the end address a like problem, namely of how the soul that inhabits a body may influence the operation of what is in the end just a big soggy clock.”

“I could not disagree more, by the way,” said Leibniz. “The soul and body influence each other not at all.”

“Then how does my soul know that yonder candle is flickering?” asked Princess Caroline. “For I can only know such a thing through my eyes, which are parts of my body.”

“Because God has put into your soul a principle representative of the candle-flame and everything else in the Universe,” said Leibniz. “But that is most certainly
not
how
God
perceives things!
He
perceives all things, because He continually produces them. And so I reject any such analogies likening God’s relationship to the Universe and ours to our bodies.”

“I do not understand Baron von Leibniz’s hypothesis at all,” Isaac confessed.

“What is
your
hypothesis, Sir Isaac?”

“That most of the animal body is a determined machine, I’ll grant. That it is controlled from the brain, has been proved, by Willis and others. It follows, simply, that, by laws of God’s choosing, the soul has the power to operate upon the brain, and thereby to influence animal movements.”

“This is just Descartes and the pineal gland all over again!” Leibniz scoffed.

“He was wrong about the pineal gland,” Newton said, “but I’ll grant a certain formal resemblance between his way of thinking about it, and mine.”

“In each case,” Daniel translated, “there is some sense in which a free, non-corporeal, non-mechanical spirit can effect physical changes in the workings of the machinery of the brain.”

“I think that much is obvious; as is the fact that God—Who is likewise a non-corporeal Spirit—has power to effect physical changes—that is, to exert Force—upon any thing whatsoever in this Universe.”

“And is it the case that when you study the causes and seats of Force in your
Praxis
work, you seek to understand Forces of that type as well?”

“I do not think that any account of Force that failed to address this topic could be deemed complete.”

“When Sir Isaac was working on the
Principia,
” said Daniel, “I paid him a visit up at Trinity. He had requested what seemed to me to be an odd lot of information: tables of the tides,
data
on a certain comet, astronomical observations of Jupiter and Saturn. Well, it was a long ride, and by the time I had reached Cambridge I’d managed to work out that there was a common thread running through all of these: gravity. Gravity causes the tides and determines the orbits of comets and planets alike. To us it is obvious now; but back
then
it was by no means agreed that a comet, let us say, might be bound by the same force that kept the Earth in its gyre. Isaac’s triumph was to perceive that all of these phænomena were attributable to the same cause, working everywhere in the same way. Now, I have long been
nonplussed by Isaac’s Alchemical research, but as years have gone by I have perceived that he would achieve a similar triumph by finding a single common underlying explanation for phænomena that we think of as diverse, and unrelated: free will, God’s presence in the Universe, miracles, and the transmutation of chymical elements. Couched in the willfully obscure jargon of the Alchemists, this cause, or principle, or whatever one wants to call it, is known as the Philosopher’s Stone, or other terms such as the Philosophic Mercury, the Vital Agent, the Latent or Subtile Spirit, the Secret Fire, the Material Soul of Matter, the Invisible Inhabitant, the Body of Light, the Seed, the Seminal Virtue.”