The System of the World (The Baroque Cycle, #3)

by Neal Stephenson

A loose fragment of veinstone. Ore washed or detached from the vein naturally.

It was exactly the sort of church that Drake would have set fire to with extreme prejudice during the Civil War. As a matter of fact, the longer Daniel looked at it, the more certain he became that Drake had torched it, and that Daniel had watched. No matter; as Mr. Threader would say, that was in the past.

Rather, I heard much talk that sounded to me like politics.” “To you. Yes. But to me, Dr. Waterhouse, it sounded like church.

’Twas as if the combination in one city of too many printing presses; a bloody and perpetual atmosphere of Party Malice; and an infinite supply of coffee; had combined, in some alchemical sense, to engender a monstrous prodigy, an unstanchable wound that bled Ink and would never heal. Daniel, who had grown to maturity

Daniel thought that the fantastically complex ornamentation of Barock churches was a replacement for the complicated things made by God, that had used to surround people when they lived out of doors (or that Hooke had seen in drops of water). Entering into a place such as this, they were surrounded by complicated things made by men in emulation of God—but frozen and idealized, in much the same way as the mathematical laws of Natural Philosophy were compared to the reality they tried to describe.

But Englishmen, given a choice, would always prefer the faintly ridiculous over the painfully direct.

Then he got a look on his face as if he were thinking. Daniel had learned, in his almost seventy years, not to expect much of people who got such looks, because thinking really was something one ought to do all the time.

False, machine-made Hope could make real Hope—that was the true Alchemy, the turning of lead into gold.

and you shall see so many enterprises that suffer from a want of Power that you shall wonder how we have gotten along without it.”

“Mind the Gap,” Saturn suggested.

war breeds corruption as flesh breeds maggots.

The makers, users, and hoarders of money were a cult, a cabal, a parasitical infestation, enduring through many ages,

We are at a fork in the road just now. One way takes us to a wholly new way of managing human affairs. It is a system I have helped, in my small way, to develop: the Royal Society, the Bank of England, Recoinage, the Whigs, and the Hanoverian Succession are all elements of it. The other way leads us to Versailles, and the rather different scheme that the King of France has got going there. I am not blind to the glories of the Sun King. I know Versailles is better than anything we have here, in many ways that count. But for every respect in which we are inferior to France, some compensation is to be found in the new System a-building here.”

And so I say that Alchemy shall not vanish, as I always hoped. Rather, it shall be encapsulated within the new System of the World, and become a familiar and even comforting presence there, though its name may change and its practitioners speak no more about the Philosopher’s Stone.

“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.

“On the contrary, Dr. Waterhouse,” said the Princess, “every philosophical dialogue I have ever read, requires one interlocutor who is of a Skeptickal habit of

The imbalance between the grand mysteries of the Universe as opposed to our own feeble faculties, leads us to set very modest expectations as to what we shall and shan’t be able to understand—and makes us passing suspicious of anyone who propounds dogma or seems to phant’sy he has got it all figured out.

I do not address, and certainly do not pretend to solve, the riddles that so confounded Monsieur Descartes. Why should we attempt to frame hypotheses about such matters?”

I am trying to draw our attention to what it is that comes down those nerves from the brain: the decisions,

“I say only that, though the machine of the body obeys deterministic laws, it does so in accordance with the desires and dictates of the soul, because of the pre-established harmony.”

we must still explain how those mechanisms are informed by the soul, spirit, or whatever we are going to call it—the thing that has free will, that is not subject to deterministic laws, and that accounts for our being human.

Now, I have long been nonplussed by Isaac’s Alchemical research, but as years have gone by I have perceived that he would achieve a similar triumph by finding a single common underlying explanation for phænomena that we think of as diverse, and unrelated: free will, God’s presence in the Universe,

I do not think one can ever own the quicksilver spirit that circulates among the minds of philosophers and ingénieurs. It is like trying to catch in a bucket the electrickal fluid of Mr. Hauksbee.”

And this—the new King, the strong Bank, the sound coinage, and all the works of Natural Philosophers and ingénieurs—are a fine beginning for a new System of the World.”

away—he has to admit that having some kind of a System, even a flawed and doomed one, is better than to live forever in the poisonous storm-tide of quicksilver that gave birth to all of this.