“I cannot imagine any slander more base than that I am an Atheist!” returned Newton. Because of his ribs, it was much more difficult for him to rise from his chair, but now he got his walking-stick under his folded hands as if he were about to give it a go.
“An Atheist? No. Never would I spread such a calumny-on my honor! But spreading doctrines that incline others toward Atheistical views is another matter. Of that you are, I regret to say, culpable.”
“Can one believe the incoherence of the man?!” Newton burst out, and regretted it, for it hurt to speak so vehemently. As long as his ribs were complaining anyway, he rose to his feet, then continued the outburst in a voice distorted by pain. “I am not an Atheist, he claims to admit-then he turns around and accuses me of spreading Atheism! It is typical of his slippery discourse, his slippery metaphysics!”
They were interrupted, but only for a moment, by a thud emanating from the floor between them. For Princess Caroline, disgruntled and bored, had used the palm of her hand to roll the globe up out of its cradle and over the rim of the felt-padded Great Circle that held it captive. It had tumbled to the rug between Newton and Leibniz. She put a foot up on it-a most undignified posture, for a Princess-and began to roll it back and forth idly as the argument went on.
“I do not think it is the least bit slippery,” said Leibniz. “You may be the most sincere Christian in the world, sir, but if you publish doctrines that are obscure, incoherent, contradictory, and impossible for readers to follow, why, they may go a-stray in their thinking and tend towards doctrines you would never espouse.”
“This is how you make amends for a false accusation of Atheism-by saying my life’s work is incoherent and contradictory? Pray do not make any more such apologies, sirrah, or I shall have to make amends to you by challenging you to a duel!”
Princess Caroline gave the globe a hard shove, and it rolled for a few yards across the carpet and scored a goal, as it were, in a large fireplace that accounted for most of one wall of the room. The hearth was slightly lower than the floor of the room, so the globe lodged there, and came to a stop between two andirons. “That globe will never do, for a modern Monarch,” she announced. “When the Prince of Wales and I move to this house, it shall have to be replaced by a new one, with more of geography and fewer of monsters and mermaids. One that shall be ready to receive Lines of Longitude whensoever that Roger Comstock finds someone to award his Prize to.” She rose now to her feet, and Newton and Leibniz, finally remembering their manners, turned to track her as she walked toward the fireplace. First, though, she wrenched a burning taper from a chair-side candelabrum. “As a rule I am averse to burning things found in Libraries, but this must be reckoned no loss at all, compared to the damage that the two of you are inflicting on Philosophy by your bickering.” She bent her knees and executed a graceful descent until she was sitting on the floor beside the hearth, skirts arranged around her. “I see things sometimes, in dreams or in day-dreams-some of them I quite fancy, for they seem to carry meaning. Those I remember, and think back on. There is one such vision that has got stuck in my head, quite as melodies often do, and I can’t seem to get rid of it. I shall try to do justice to it thusly.” And she reached out with the candle and let its flame lave the underside of the globe. The globe was of wood, and too heavy to catch fire readily; but paper gores printed with images of continents had been pasted over it. The paper caught fire, and a ragged flame-ring began to spread, consuming the cartographer’s work and leaving behind it a blackened and featureless sphere. “Sophie kept trying to tell me, before she died, that a new System of the World was being made. Oh, it is not a terribly novel thing to say. I know, and Sophie knew, that the third volume of your Principia Mathematica bears that name, Sir Isaac. Since she died, I have become quite convinced that she was correct-and moreover that the System is to be born, not at Versailles, but here-that this shall be its Prime Meridian, and all else shall be reckoned, and ruled, from here. It is a pleasing notion that there is to be such a System, and that I might play some small part in being its midwife. I think of the globe, with its neat parallels and meridians, as the Emblem of this System-what the Cross is to Christianity. But I am troubled by the vision of such a Globe in flames. What you are looking at here is a poor rendition of it; in my nightmares, it is ever so much more lovely and dreadful.”
“What do you suppose that vision signifies, highness?” asked Daniel Waterhouse.
“That this System, if it is set up wrong, might be doomed from the start,” said Caroline. “Oh, it shall be a wonder to behold at first, and all shall marvel at its regularity, its ?conomy, and the ingenuity of them who framed it. Perhaps it shall work as planned for a decade, or a century, or more. And yet if it has been made wrong at the beginning, it shall burn, in the end, and my vision shall be realized in a manner infinitely more destructive than this.” She gave the smoking globe a nudge. It had been wholly scoured by the flames and become a trackless black orb.
Daniel now stepped over and gave her a hand up. “I do not concern myself so much,” said Caroline, turning toward Leibniz and Newton, “with bankers, merchants, clock-makers, or Longitude-finders, and their roles in the creation of this System. Or even with Astronomers and Alchemists. But I am terribly concerned with my Philosophers, for if they get it wrong, then the System is flawed, and shall burn, in the end. Stop your bickering and get to work.”
“As it pleases your highness,” said Sir Isaac. “What would you have us work on?”
“Baron von Leibniz may be on to something,” said Caroline, “which is that, though you, and most other Fellows of the Royal Society, are true Christians, and believers in Free Will, the very doctrines and methods that the Royal Society has promulgated have caused many to question the existence of God, the divinity of Christ, the authority of the Church, the premise that we have souls endowed with Free Will. Why, Dr. Waterhouse himself has lately given me the lamentable news that he has quite abandoned all such doctrines.”
This earned Daniel perturbed and puzzled looks from Newton and Leibniz. All he could do, in the face of such disapproval from such minds, was make a frail smile and shrug. Caroline continued, “As so much of civilization is rooted in those beliefs, this strikes me as one way in which our System of the World might be set up wrongly and thus self-doomed. Neither you, Sir Isaac, nor you, Baron von Leibniz, sees the slightest contradiction between your Faith and the true and fearless pursuit of Natural Philosophy. But you differ radically in how you reconcile the one with the other. If you two cannot manage it, no one can; and so I would like for you to work on that, if you please.”
“Your royal highness’s discourse concerning the System of the World, and the threat of its running awry at some future time, puts me in mind of a thing I do not understand in the philosophy of Sir Isaac Newton,” Leibniz began. “Sir Isaac describes that System by which the heavenly bodies are kept in their gyres, and made to orbit round and round forever. Fine. But he seems to say that God, who created this system and set it in motion, must from time to time reach in and tinker with it, as a horologist adjusts the workings of his clock. As if God lacked the foresight, or the power, to make it a perpetual motion.”
“You are over-reacting to a passage from my Opticks that is really not all that important,” Isaac began.
“On the contrary, sir, it is very important indeed, if it is wrong, and puts wrong ideas in people’s heads!”
“Then as you are at such pains to correct my errors, Herr Leibniz, let me return the favor in kind. This similitude, likening the universe to a clock, and God to a horologist, is faulty. A horologist is presented with certain laws or facts of nature, viz. that weights descend towards the center of the earth and springs push back when deflected. Taking these as givens, he hacks away at his bench to produce some mechanism that exploits these properties in a more or less ingenious way. Ones who are more ingenious, make clocks that require adjustment less often, and one who was perfect would, I suppose, make one that would never need it at all. But God does not merely compose the objects and forces that were given to Him, but is Himself the Author of those objects and forces. Author, and preserver. Nothing happens in this world without His government and His inspection. Think of Him not as a watch-maker but as a King. Suppose there were a Kingdom where all things ran forever in an orderly and regular way without the King ever having to attend, make judgments, or exercise his powers. If it were, in sum, so ordered that the King could be removed from it without any diminution, then he would be a King only in name, and not deserving of the respect and loyalty of his subjects.”