“Daniel, it is well that your friend and mine Mr. John Locke foretold your coming, or I should take it the wrong way.”
“How so, Isaac?”
“I have got into an odd turn of mind of late. The world seemeth benign enough, as I sit here in a bright garden among friends. But when night falls, as it does earlier and earlier, darkness stretches over my mind, and I phant’sy long menacing shadows cast by everyone and everything I saw during the day-time, which shades are interconnected in plots and conspiracies.”
“Everyone, save mad-men in Bedlam, has a Plot. Everyone belongs to a conspiracy or two. What is the Royal Society, besides a conspiracy? I shall not claim I am innocent. But the conspiracy I represent wants only good things for you.”
“I shall be the judge of that! How could you possibly know what is good for me?”
“If you could see yourself as I see you, Isaac, you would confess in an instant that I know much more of it than you do. How long has it been since you have slept?”
“Five nights I have sat up by the fire, tending a work.”
“The Great Work?”
“You have known me almost as long as I have known myself, Daniel, why do you waste breath asking? For you know that I will not answer you straight out. And you already know the answer. So your question is idle twice over.”
“Five nights…then I have come haply on this day, as I may be a match for you, Isaac, if you have gone a week without sleep beforehand.”
“In what wise do you seek to be my match, Daniel?”
Behind him Masham started to say something and was quickly shushed. Daniel turned halfway round and discovered that Fatio had followed him as far as Locke’s study; having now been discovered, he emerged into the garden, moving in an odd diagonal gait like a startled dog, acknowledging Daniel with a little bow. But he would not look Daniel in the eye.
“In what wise? Not as Fatio would be-this was settled between you and me on Whitsunday of the year 1662, unless I read the signs wrong.” A slow assenting blink of Newton’s bloodshot eyes told him he hadn’t. “And certainly not as Leibniz seeks to be.”
Fatio scoffed. “We have read Mr. Leibniz’s letter-which is nothing more than a butcherous attack on my theory of gravitation!”
“If Leibniz cuts down your theory of gravitation, Monsieur Fatio, it only means he has the courage and forthrightness to set down in ink what Huygens and Halley and Hooke and Wren have all said amongst themselves ever since you presented it to the Royal Society. And I mean to emulate Leibniz now. Stay, Fatio, no show of indignation, please, I cannot abide it. I see three faces in this garden: Fatio, who has just been attacked, and is ready to respond very hotly; Newton, who is strangely ambivalent, as if he agrees with me in secret; Locke, who perhaps wishes I had never come to disturb your colloquium. But disturb it I have, and now I shall disturb it some more. For as I reflect on my career I believe I could have accomplished more if I had not cared so much what people thought of me. Natural Philosophy cannot advance without attacking theories that are old, and beating back new ones that are wrong, neither of which may be accomplished without doing some injury to their professors. I have been a mediocre Natural Philosopher not because I was stupid but because I was, after a fashion, cowardly. Today I shall try boldness for once, and be a better Natural Philosopher for it, and probably get you all hating me by the time I am done. Then it’s off to Boston on the next boat. Therefore, Fatio, do not defend your theory or attack that of Leibniz with some tedious outburst, but, prithee, shut up and hate me instead. Isaac, this is what I mean when I say that I shall try to be a match for you today. If you hate me when I leave, then let that be a measure of my success.”
“This is a harsh method,” Isaac reflected, shivering even more violently now. “But I cannot deny that in my career scientific disputes have always been coupled with the most intense personal enmity. And I am not of a mood to be tender and conciliatory just now. So, have at it. I may understand you better as an enemy than as a friend.”
“When I saw you here in this rain of dead petals I was put in mind of the spring of 1666 when I came up to Woolsthorpe and saw you in a flurry of apple-blossoms. Do you recollect that day?”
“Of course.”
“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.”