Quicksilver (44 page)

“’Twas well-conceived,” was Roger Comstock’s verdict. “Those were Royal Guards—the Duke of York’s new regiment. Oh, they’re commanded by John Churchill, but make no mistake, they are York’s men.”

“What on earth do you mean when you say something like this was well-conceived? I mean, you sound like a
connoisseur
sipping the latest port.”

“Well, that Mobb could’ve burnt the Pope anywhere, couldn’t they? But they chose here. Why here? Couldn’t’ve chosen a more dangerous place, what with Grenadiers so near to hand. Well, the answer of course is that they wished to send a message to the Duke of York…to wit, that if he doesn’t renounce his Papist ways, next time they’ll be burning
him
in effigy—if not in
person
.”

“Even I could see, that night at Cambridge, that Gunfleet and the younger Angleseys are the new favorites at Court,” Daniel said. “While Epsom is lampooned in plays, and his house besieged by the Mobb.”

“Not so remarkable really, given the rumors…”

“What rumors?” Daniel almost added
I am not the sort of person who hears or heeds such things,
but just now it was difficult to be so haughty.

“That our indifferent fortune in the war is chargeable to faulty cannon, and bad powder.”

“What a marvellously convenient excuse for failure in war!”

Until that moment Daniel had not heard anyone say aloud that the war was going badly. The very idea that the English and the French together could not best a few Dutchmen was absurd on its face. Yet, now that Roger had mentioned it, there was a lack of good news, obvious in retrospect. Of course people would be looking for someone to blame.

“The cannon that burst at the ‘Siege of Maestricht,’” Daniel said, “do you reckon ’twas shoddy goods? Or was it a scheme laid by Epsom’s enemies?”

“He has enemies,” was all Roger would say.

“
That
I see,” said Daniel, “and, too, I see that the Duke of Gun-fleet is one of them, and that he, and other Papists, like the Duke of York, are a great power in the land. What I do
not
understand is why those two enemies, Epsom and Gunfleet, a few minutes ago were as one man in heaping obloquy on the memory of John Wilkins.”

“Epsom and Gunfleet are like two captains disputing command
of a ship, each calling the other a mutineer,” Roger explained. “The ship, in this similitude, is the Realm with its established church—Anglican or Papist, depending on as Epsom’s or Gunfleet’s faction prevails. There is a third faction belowdecks—dangerous chaps, well organized and armed, but, most unnervingly, under no distinct leader at the moment. When these Dissidents, as they are called, say, ‘Down with the Pope!’ it is music to the ears of the Anglicans, whose church is founded on hostility to all things Romish. When they say, ‘Down with forced Uniformity, let Freedom of Conscience prevail,’ it gladdens the hearts of the Papists, who cannot practice their faith under that Act of Uniformity that Epsom wrote. And so at different times both Epsom’s and Gunfleet’s factions phant’sy the Dissidents as allies. But when the Dissidents question the idea of an Established Church, and propose to make the whole country an Amsterdam, why then it seems to the leaders of both factions that these Dissident madmen are lighting fuzes on powder-kegs
to blow up the ship itself.
And
then
they unite to crush the Dissidents.”

“So you are saying that Wilkins’s legacy, the Declaration of Indulgence, is a powder-keg to them.”

“It is a fuze that might, for all they know, lead to a powder-keg. They must stomp it out.”

“Stomping on me as well.”

“Only because you presented yourself to be stomped in the stupidest possible way—by your leave, by your leave.”

“Well, what
ought
I to’ve done, when they were attacking him so?”

“Bit your tongue and bided your time,” Roger said. “Things can change in a
second.
Behold this Pope-burning! Led by Dissidents, against Papists. If you, Daniel, had marched at the head of that Mobb, why, Epsom would feel you were on his side against Anglesey.”

“Just what I need—the Duke of Gunfleet as personal enemy.”

“Then prate about Freedom of Conscience! That is the excellence of your position, Daniel—if you would only open your eyes to it. Through nuances and shifts so subtle as to be
plausibly deniable,
you may have
either
Epsom
or
Gunfleet as your ally at any given moment.”

“It sounds cavilling and pusillanimous,” said Daniel, summoning up some words from the tables of the Philosophick Language.

Without disagreeing, Roger said: “It is the key to achieving what Drake dreamed of.”

“How!? When all the power is in the hands of the Angleseys and the Silver Comstocks.”

“Very soon you shall see how wrong you are in that.”

“Oh? Is there some other source of power I am not aware of?”

“Yes,” said Roger, “and your uncle Thomas Ham’s cellar is full of it.”

“But that gold is not his. It is the sum of his obligations.”

“Just so! You have put your finger on it! There is hope for you,” Roger said, and stepped back from the bench preparatory to taking leave. “I hope that you will consider my proposal in any event…Sir.”

“Consider it under consideration, Sir.”

“And even if there is no time in your life for houses—perhaps I could beg a few hours for my theatre—”

“Did you say
theatre?
”

“I’ve bought part interest in one, yes—the King’s Comedians play there—we produced
Love in a Tub
and
The Lusty Chirurgeon
. From time to time, we need help making thunder and lightning, as well as demonic apparitions, angelic visitations, impalements, sex-changes, hangings, live births,
et cetera
.”

“Well, I don’t know what my family would think of my being involved in such things, Roger.”

“Poh! Look at what
they
have been up to! Now that the Apocalypse has failed to occur, Daniel, you must find something to do with your several talents.”

“I suppose the least I could to is keep you from blowing yourself to pieces.”

“I can hide nothing from you, Daniel. Yes. You have divined it. That evening in the laboratory, I was making powder for theatrickal squibs. When you grind it finer, you see, it burns faster—more flash, more bang.”

“I noticed,” Daniel said. Which made Roger laugh; which made Daniel feel happy. And so into a sort of spiral they went. “I’ve an appointment to meet Dr. Leibniz at a coffee-house in the theatre district later…so why don’t we walk in that direction now?” Daniel said.

“PERHAPS YOU MIGHT HAVE STUMBLED
across my recent monograph,
On the Incarnation of God…
”

“Oldenburg mentioned it,” Daniel said, “but I must confess that I have never attempted to read it.”

“During our last conversation, we spoke of the difficulty of reconciling a
mechanical
philosophy with free will. This problem has any number of resonances with the
theological
question of incarnation.”

“In that both have to do with spiritual essences being infused into bodies that are in essence mechanical,” Daniel said agreeably.
All around them, fops and theatre-goers were edging away towards other tables, leaving Leibniz and Waterhouse with a pleasant clear space in the midst of what was otherwise a crowded coffee-house.

“The problem of the Trinity is the mysterious union of the divine and human natures of Christ. Likewise, when we debate whether a mechanism—such as a fly drawn to the smell of meat, or a trap, or an arithmetickal engine—is
thinking
by itself, or merely
displaying the ingenuity
of its creator, we are asking whether or not those engines have, in some sense, been imbued with an
incorporeal principle
or, vulgarly,
spirit
that, like God or an angel, possesses free will.”

“Again, I hear an echo of the Scholastics in your words—”

“But Mr. Waterhouse, you are making the common mistake of thinking that we must have Aristotle
or
Descartes—that the two philosophies are irreconcilable. On the contrary! We may accept modern, mechanistic explanations in physics, while retaining Aristotle’s concept of self-sufficiency.”

“Forgive me for being skeptical of that—”

“It is your
responsibility
to be skeptical, Mr. Waterhouse, no forgiveness is needed. The details of how these two concepts may be reconciled are somewhat lengthy—suffice it to say that I have found a way to do it, by assuming that every body contains an incorporeal principle, which I identify with
cogitatio.
”

“Thought.”

“Yes!”

“Where is this principle to be found? The Cartesians think it’s in the pineal gland—”

“It is not spread out through space in any such vulgar way—but the
organization
that it causes is distributed throughout the body—it
informs
the body—and we may know that it exists, by observing that information. What is the difference between a man who has just died, and one who is going to die in a few ticks of Mr. Hooke’s watch?”

“The Christian answer is that one has a soul, and the other does not.”

“And it is a fine answer—it needs only to be translated into a new Philosophical Language, as it were.”

“You would translate it, Doctor, by stating that the
living
body is informed by this organizing principle—which is the outward and visible sign that the mechanical body is, for the time being anyway, unified with an incorporeal principle called Thought.”

“That is correct. Do you recall our discussion of symbols? You admitted that your mind cannot manipulate a spoon directly—instead it must manipulate a symbol of the spoon, inside the mind.
God could manipulate the spoon directly, and we would name it a miracle. But
created
minds cannot—they need a passive element through which to act.”

“The body.”

“Yes.”

“But you say that
Cogitatio
and
Computation
are the same, Doctor—in the Philosophical Language, a single word would suffice for both.”

“I have concluded that they are one and the same.”

“But your Engine does computation. And so I am compelled to ask, at what point does it become imbued with the incorporeal principle of Thought? You say that
Cogitatio
informs the body, and somehow organizes it into a mechanical system that is capable of acting. I will accept that for now. But with the Arithmetickal Engine, you are working backwards—constructing a mechanical system in the hopes that it will become impregnated from above—as the Holy Virgin. When does the Annunciation occur—at the moment you put the last gear into place? When you turn the crank?”

“You are too literal-minded,” Leibniz said.

“But you have told me that you see no conflict between the notion that the mind is a mechanickal device, and a belief in free will. If that is the case, then there must be some point at which your Arithmetickal Engine will cease to be a collection of gears, and become the body into which some angelic mind has become incarnated.”

“It is a false dichotomy!” Leibniz protested. “An incorporeal principle
alone
would not give us free will. If we accept—as we must—that God is omniscient, and has foreknowledge of all events that will occur in the future, then He knows what we will do before we do it, and so—even if we be angels—we cannot be said to have free will.”

“That’s what I was always taught in church. So the prospects for your philosophy seem dismal, Doctor—free will seems untenable both on grounds of theology and of Natural Philosophy.”

“So you say, Mr. Waterhouse—and yet you agree with Hooke that there is a mysterious consonance between the behavior of Nature, and the workings of the human mind. Why should that be?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea, Doctor. Unless, as the Alchemists have it, all matter—Nature and our brains together—are suffused by the same Philosophick Mercury.”

“A hypothesis neither one of us loves.”

“What is
your
hypothesis, Doctor?”

“Like two arms of a snowflake, Mind and Matter grew out of a common center—and even though they grew
independently
and
without communicating—each developing according to its own internal rules—nevertheless they grew in perfect harmony, and share the same shape and structure.”

“It is rather Metaphysickal,” was all Daniel could come back with. “What’s the common center? God?”

“God arranged things from the beginning so that Mind could understand Nature. But He did not do this by continual meddling in the development of Mind, and the unfolding of the Universe…rather He fashioned the nature of both Mind and Nature to be harmonious from the beginning.”

“So, I have complete freedom of action…but God knows in advance what I will do, because it is my nature to act in harmony with the world, and God partakes of that harmony.”

“Yes.”

“It is odd that we should be having this conversation, Doctor, because during the last few days, for the first time in my life, I have felt as if certain possibilities have been set before me, which I may reach out and grasp if I so choose.”

“You sound like a man who has found a patron.”

The notion of Roger Comstock as patron made Daniel’s gorge rise a bit. But he could not deny Leibniz’s insight. “Perhaps.”

“I am pleased, for your sake. The death of my patron has left
me
with very few choices.”

“There must be some nobleman in Paris who appreciates you, Doctor.”

“I was thinking rather of going to Leiden to stay with Spinoza.”

“But Holland is soon to be overrun…you could not pick a worse place to be.”

“The Dutch Republic has enough shipping to carry two hundred thousand persons out of Europe, and around the Cape of Good Hope to the furthermost islands of Asia, far out of reach of France.”

“That is entirely too phantastickal for me to believe.”

“Believe. The Dutch are already making plans for this. Remember, they made half of their land with the labor of their hands! What they did once in Europe, they can do again in Asia. If the last ditch is stormed, and the United Provinces fall under the heel of King Louis, I intend to be there, and I will board ship and go to Asia and help build a new Commonwealth—like the New Atlantis that Francis Bacon described.”