The Confusion

Newton and Fatio looked at each other, and Daniel looked at them. Fatio had a kind of tender, insinuating look on his face, and Daniel got the idea it was very far from the first time he had shown that sort of face to Newton, and that Fatio was used to seeing a tender and loving face looking back his way. But not today. Newton was staring at Fatio not with love, but with avid curiosity, as if suddenly perceiving what had escaped his notice before. Daniel had no love for Fatio, but this made him so uneasy that he lost the courage he’d maintained up until now.

“I wish to tell you a story about Robert Hooke,” he announced.

This was one of the few things that could get Isaac’s attention away from his minute, penetrating study of Nicolas Fatio de Duillier. He turned his eyes toward Daniel, who went on: “Before I came up to Woolsthorpe, Isaac, I did an experiment with him. We set up a scale above a well, and weighed the same object at the level of the ground, and again three hundred feet below it, to see if there was a difference. For you see, Hooke had an inkling of the inverse-square law.”

Isaac did a little calculation in his head and said, “There was no observable difference.”

“Just so. Hooke was let down, of course, but as we drove home he conceived a refinement of the experiment, which has never been carried out. But the point of the story is that our colloquium at Epsom succeeded at much, but failed in that, its most ambitious effort. Did it mean the end of Natural Philosophy? No. The end of Hooke’s career, or Wilkins’s, or mine? By no means. On the contrary, it led straight on to a flourishing of all those things. Which has led me to mistrust apocalyptic readings of Science or of Society. I have not been quick to learn that lesson, either. For example, I phant’sied that the Glorious Revolution would change all, but now I see that Cavaliers and Roundheads have only been replaced by Tories and Whigs, and the war goes on.”

“Am I to gather that you intend to draw some parallel between the failures of Hooke, and the prospects for our collaboration?” Fatio said, with forced hilarity. “I supposed you were here as a cat’s paw for Leibniz! He at least is a worthy opponent! He came out with calculus after Isaac and I did so, but at least he knows what it is! Hooke is nothing more than a sooty, bloody empiricist!”

“I am here as a cat’s paw for Isaac Newton, my friend of thirty years. I fear for him because I perceive that he has an idea of what Natural Philosophy is, and of what he is, that is false. He is so far above all of the rest of us that he has come to believe that he carries the burden of some millennial destiny, and that he must bring Natural Philosophy to some ultimate omega-point or be a failure. He has been encouraged to believe this by certain sycophantic admirers.”

“You want him back! You want Isaac to revoke the decision he made on Whitsunday of 1662!”

“No. I want him to repeat the same decision in respect of you, Fatio. He withdrew from me in ’62. From Leibniz in ’77. Now it is ’93, and your card has been dealt.”

“I know all about what happened in ’62 and ’77. Isaac told me. But with us it is a different case. With us there is a real, lasting, mutual affection.”

“Nicolas, that much is true,” Isaac said. “But you misunderstand. Daniel is working his way round towards another matter.”

“What could Mr. Waterhouse possibly say that would be of interest? He is an amanuensis, a secretary.”

“Do not make any more such offending statements about Daniel,” Isaac commanded. “He has done us the favor, Nicolas, of thinking about our future. Which is a matter we did not consider at all, so confident were we. But Daniel is right. We have failed. Our line was not long enough to fathom the depths on which we had ventured. It will be necessary to regroup, to start over again. We shall require time and money and leisure.”

“Isaac,” Daniel said, “two or three years ago, before you set out on the Great Work that has just come to an end, you made inquiries, with Pepys and Roger Comstock and others, concerning the possibility of a position in London. Since then Trinity College has only become more impoverished-your need of a reliable income cannot have been met from that quarter. Now I have come to offer you the Mint.”

Everyone now observed a prayerful silence for a minute or two as Isaac Newton considered it.

“In normal circumstances the position would be without interest,” he said, “but Comstock has sent adumbrations my way concerning a great Recoinage.”

“It is intended that Recoinage would be your Great Work. Which I do not say in jest. For perhaps that is indeed the only way that the Philosophic Mercury could ever be recovered.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Hooke could not find the inverse-square law in a well because there was too little of what he was looking for, for his equipment to find it. You could not extract the Philosophic Mercury from gold, perhaps for a like reason.”