The System of the World: Volume Three of the Baroque Cycle

by Neal Stephenson

  “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, wh
ich 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.”

  “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?”