The System Of The World (The Baroque Cycle, #3)

by Neal Stephenson

Volume III of Principia Mathematica, entitled The System of the World, available shortly where books are sold.

Because you had noble qualities? No. Only because you were Good with Money—a high sorceress of the coin-cult—and so were adored by the same sort of degraded Versailles court-fops who would gather in abandoned churches at midnight to recite the Black Mass.

For unless my eyes are telling me lies, my brother, who has ever been a disgrace to the family name, is down there attempting to redeem himself, and repent, and redress his sins, and so on and so forth, by the ancient and honorable trial of single combat—for the honour of a fair lady, no less!

Does this mean you have found me worthy to distinguish between the majority of charlatans and the minority of—” “The Wise? Yes.” “Does that mean I am Wise?” “No. You are not Wise but erudite. You are a member of the Societas Eruditorum.” “Leibniz has spoken of it, but I did not know I was a member.” “It is not like these guys,” Solomon said, rapping a knuckle on a Templar-sarcophagus, “with bylaws and initiation-rites and such.” “Are you a member?” “No.” “Are you Wise?” “Yes.”

“Your royal highness,” he said to the young woman, “this is Sir Isaac Newton. Sir Isaac, it is my honor to present Her Royal Highness Caroline, Princess of Wales, Electoral Princess of Hanover, et cetera, et cetera.”

“He was last seen southbound at a speed normally seen only among men who have been projected from high cliffs,” Daniel allowed.

Myself, I am comfortable with the notion that we are Machines made of Meat, that there’s no more free will in us than there is in a cuckoo-clock, and that the spirit, soul, or whatever you want to call it, is a færy-tale. Many who study Natural Philosophy will arrive at the same conclusion, unless the two of you find a way of convincing them otherwise.

answer. “I shall see you, Daniel, on Parnassus, or wherever it is that Philosophers end up!” “I think they end up in old books,” said Daniel, “and so I shall look for you, sir, in a Library.” “That is what I am building,” said Leibniz, “and that is where you shall find me.

Jack concludes that the Mysterious Personage who brought it to him must have employed not only bribery, but threats of Prosecution and of Physical Violence as well.

“I, Jack Shaftoe, also known as L’Emmerdeur, the King of the Vagabonds, Ali Zaybak, Quicksilver, Lord of Divine Fire, Jack the Coiner, do hereby repent of all my sins and commend my soul to God,” he says, “and ask only that I receive a decent Christian burial, with all of my quarters, if they can be rounded up, to be put together in the same box. And my head, too.

HERE ENDS The BAROQUE CYCLE This I have now published; not for the public good [which I do not think my poor abilities can promote], but to gratify my brother the Stationer. The benefits of that trade do chiefly consist in the printing of copies; and the vanity of this age is more taken with matters of curiosity, than those of solid benefit. Such a pamphlet as this, may be salable, when a more substantial and useful discourse is neglected. –John Wilkins