The Confusion

“I had just ridden up from Epsom where Hooke and Wilkins and I had been holding a colloquium much like this one. The overriding subject of it could be called ‘Life: what it is, and is not.’ Now I come here and find you studying what I will summarize as ‘God: what god-head is and is not.’ Have I said it well?”

“This way of saying it is very easily misunderstood,” Locke demurred.

“Stay, John,” Newton commanded, “Daniel misunderstands nothing.”

“Thank you, Isaac,” Daniel said. “If what you say is true, ’tis so only in that I have strived for so many years to follow your tortuous windings through these matters. It has been no easy task. Bible-stuff has always been intermingled with your philosophical work, and I could never understand why, in our chambers, star-catalogs were so promiscuously thrown together with Hebraic scriptures, occult treatises on the philosophic mercury interleaved with diagrams of new telescopes, et cetera. But at last I came to understand that I was making it too complicated. For you, this is no mingling at all; for you the Book of Revelation, the ramblings of Hermes Trismegistus, and Principia Mathematica are all signatures torn from the same immense Book.”

“Why is it, Daniel, that you understand all of these matters with such clarity, and yet will not join with us? It seems to me as if some friend of Galileo had looked through his telescope and seen the moons of Jupiter making their circuits and yet refused to believe his own eyes, and taken the dead view of the Papists instead.”

“Isaac, I have done nothing but ask myself that for sixteen years.”

“You refer to what happened in 1677.”

“What did happen in 1677, anyway?” Fatio inquired. “Everyone wants to know.”

“Leibniz made his second visit to England. He went incognito to Cambridge, for no purpose other than to have a conversation with Isaac. Which did occur. But as they punted down the Cam, discoursing, I came upon papers in our chambers proving that Isaac had fallen into Arianism, which I saw as an unspeakable heresy. I burned those papers, and with them many of Isaac’s alchemical notes and books-for to me they were all of a piece. To which crime I now confess freely, and offer my repentance, and ask for forgiveness.”

“You speak as if you never expect to see me again!” Newton exclaimed, with tears in his eyes. “I perceived your shame, and knew your heart, and forgave you long ago, Daniel.”

“I know it.”

“Most of what you burned anyway was twaddle. You’ll see none of it here. Yet here I am infinitely closer to the Grand Magisterium.”

“I know you have torn Alchemy down to its foundations, and built it back up, and are recording it in a book called Praxis, which will be to Alchemy what Principia Mathematica was to physics. And perhaps ’tis hoped that in combination with some new reading of scriptures from Fatio, here, and new philosophy from Locke, there, and a reworking of Christianity on Arian principles from your disciples scattered round England, it shall all come together in some grand unifying discourse, a kind of scientific apocalypse in which the whole universe, and all history, shall be made clear as distilled water.”

“You mock us, by making it simple.”

“It is not simple, then? ’Twill not all happen at once, in a flash?”

“It is not for us to say in advance the manner of how it might happen.”

“Yet you have been awake five nights tending some work that you’ll not entrust to any assistant. You suffer obvious ill effects of quicksilver poisoning. You will not admit it is the Great Work, but what else could it be? And I cannot read your mind, Isaac, or ask you to divulge secrets, but I can see plainly enough that it failed. And if it was meant to combine with Fatio’s theory of gravity, then that has failed as well.”

“Before you mock our work, sir, prithee tell us in what way Leibniz’s has succeeded,” Fatio demanded.

“His differs from yours in that it does not need to succeed-only not to fail. And I take that to be a more sound way of doing science than your approach, which is all-or-nothing. For as I grow older and see new men coming into the Royal Society I perceive that though Natural Philosophy may have begun with our generation, it need not end with us. Nor am I alone in thinking so.” Daniel now lifted up a sheet he had taken from Locke’s study, and read: “It is of great use to the sailor to know the length of his line, though he cannot with it fathom all the depths of the ocean. It is well he knows that it is long enough to reach the bottom, at such places as are necessary to direct his voyage, and caution him against running upon shoals that may ruin him.”

“What sniveling fool penned that nonsense?” Fatio demanded.

“Mr. John Locke. And the ink is still damp on it,” Daniel replied.

“I am quite sure he did not mean it to apply to Isaac Newton!” Fatio returned, jarred, but recovering quickly.

“I believe what you really mean to say is, ‘Newton and Fatio,’ ” Daniel said.