Daniel went down and eventually found Isaac bent and kneeling in the chapel, wracked with agony, praying desperately for the salvation of his immortal soul. Daniel could not but sympathize, though he knew too little of sin and too little of Isaac to guess what his friend might be repenting for. Daniel sat nearby and did a little praying of his own. In time, the pain and fear seemed to ebb away. The chapel filled up. A service was begun. They took out the Books of Common Prayer and turned to the page for Whitsunday. The priest intoned: “What is required of them who come to the Lord’s Supper?” They answered, “To examine themselves whether they repent of their former sins, steadfastly purporting to lead a new life.” Daniel watched Isaac’s face as he spoke this catechism and saw in it the same fervor that always lit up Drake’s mangled countenance when he really thought he was on to something. Both of them took communion. This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

Daniel watched Isaac change from a tortured wretch, literally writhing in spiritual pain, into a holy and purified saint. Having repented of their former sins-steadfastly purporting to lead new lives-they went back up to their chamber. Isaac pitched that drawing into the fire, opened up his note-book, and began to write. At the head of a blank page he wrote Sins committed before Whitsunday 1662 and then began writing out a list of every bad thing he’d ever done that he could remember, all the way back to his childhood: wishing that his stepfather was dead, beating up some boy at school, and so forth. He wrote all day and into the night. When he had exhausted himself he started up a new page entitled Since Whitsunday 1662 and left it, for the time being, blank.

Meanwhile, Daniel turned back to his Euclid. Jeffreys kept reminding him that he had failed at being a holy man. Jeffreys did this because he supposed it was a way of torturing Daniel the Puritan. In fact, Daniel had never wanted to be a preacher anyway, save insofar as he wanted to please his father. Ever since his meeting with Wilkins, he had wanted only to be a Natural Philosopher. Failing the moral test had freed him to be that, at a heavy price in self-loathing. If Natural Philosophy led him to eternal damnation, there was nothing he could do about it anyway, as Drake the predestinationist would be the first to affirm. An interval of years or even decades might separate Whitsunday 1662 and Daniel’s arrival at the gates of Hell. He reckoned he might as well fill that time with something he at least found interesting.

A month later, when Isaac was out of the room, Daniel opened up the note-book and turned to the page headed Since Whitsunday 1662. It was still blank.

He checked it again two months later. Nothing.

At the time he assumed that Isaac had simply forgotten about it. Or perhaps he had stopped sinning! Years later, Daniel understood that neither guess was true. Isaac Newton had stopped believing himself capable of sin.

This was a harsh judgment to pass on anyone-and the proverb went Judge not lest ye be judged. But its converse was that when you were treating with a man like Isaac Newton, the rashest and cruelest judge who ever lived, you must be sure and swift in your own judgments.

Others apart sat on a Hill retir’d,

In thoughts more elevate, and reason’d high

Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and Fate

-MILTON,Paradise Lost

LIKE A GOODCARTESIANwho measures everything against a fixed point, Daniel Waterhouse thinks about whether or not to go back to England while keeping one eye, through a half-closed door, on his son: Godfrey William, the fixed stake that Daniel has driven into the ground after many decades’ wanderings. At an arbitrary place on a featureless plain, some would argue, but now the Origin of all his considerations. Sir Isaac would have it that all matter is a sort of permanent ongoing miracle, that planets are held in their orbits, and atoms in their places, by the immanent will of God, and looking at his own son, Daniel can hardly bear to think otherwise. The boy’s a coiled spring, the potential for generations of American Waterhouses, though it’s just as likely he’ll catch a fever and die tomorrow.

In most other Boston houses, a slave woman would be looking after the boy, leaving the parents free to discourse with their visitor. Daniel Waterhouse does not own slaves. The reasons are several. Some of them are even altruistic. So little Godfrey sits on the lap, not of some Angolan negress, but of their neighbor: the daft but harmless Mrs. Goose, who comes into their home occasionally to do the one thing that she apparently can do: to entertain children by spouting all manner of nonsensical stories and doggerel that she has collected or invented. Meanwhile Enoch is off trying to make arrangements with Captain van Hoek of the Minerva. This has freed Daniel and Faith and the young Rev. Wait Still Waterhouse*to discuss what is the best way to respond to the startling invitation from Princess Caroline of Ansbach. Many words are said, but they make no more impact on Daniel than Mrs. Goose’s incoherent narratives about cutlery leaping over c?lestial bodies and sluttish hags living in discarded footwear.

Wait Still Waterhouse says something like, “You’re sixty-seven, it’s true, but you have your health-many have lived much longer.”

“If you avoid large crowds, sleep well, nourish yourself-” Faith says.

“Lon-don Bridge is fal-ling down, fal-ling down, fal-ling down…,” sings Mrs. Goose.

“My mind has never felt quite so much like an arrangement of cranks and gears,” Daniel says. “I decided what I was going to do quite some time ago.”

“But people have been known to change their minds-” says the reverend.

“Am I to infer, from what you just said, that you are a Free Will man?” Daniel inquires. “I really am shocked to find that in a Waterhouse. What are they teaching at Harvard these days? Don’t you realize that this Colony was founded by people fleeing from those who backed the concept of Free Will?”

“I don’t fancy that the Free Will question really had very much to do with the founding of this Colony. It was more a rebellion against the entire notion of an Established church-be it Papist or Anglican. It is true that many of those Independents-such as our ancestor John Waterhouse-got their doctrine from the Calvinists in Geneva, and scorned the notion, so cherished by the Papists and the Anglicans, of Free Will. But this alone would not have sufficed to send them into exile.”

“I get it not from Calvin but from Natural Philosophy,” Daniel says. “The mind is a machine, a Logic Mill. That’s what I believe.”

“Like the one you have been building across the river?”

“A good deal more effective than that one, fortunately.”

“You think that if you made yours better, it could do what the human mind does? That it could have a soul?”

“When you speak of a soul, you phant’sy something above and beyond the cranks and gears, the dead matter, of which the machine-be it a Logic Mill or a brain-is constructed. I do not believe in this.”

“Why not?”

Like many simple questions, this one is difficult for Daniel to answer. “Why not? I suppose because it puts me in mind of Alchemy. This soul, this extra thing added to the brain, reminds me of the Quintessence that the Alchemists are forever seeking: a mysterious supernatural presence that is supposed to suffuse the world. But they can never seem to find any. Sir Isaac Newton has devoted his life to the project and has nothing to show for it.”