“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.”
“If your sympathies do not run in that direction, then I know better than to change your mind, at least where Free Will versus Predestination is concerned,” says Wait Still. “But I know that when you were a boy you had the privilege of sitting at the knee of men such as John Wilkins, Gregory Bolstrood, Drake Waterhouse, and many others of Independent sympathies-men who preached freedom of conscience. Who advocated Gathered, as opposed to Established, churches. The flourishing of small congregations. Abolition of central dogma.”
Daniel, still not quite believing it: “Yes…”
Wait Still, brightly: “So what’s to stop me from preaching Free Will to my flock?”
Daniel laughs. “And, as you are not merely glib, but young, handsome, and personable, converting many to the same creed-including, I take it, my own wife?”
Faith blushes, then stands up and turns around to hide it. In the candle-light, a bit of silver glints in her hair: a hair-pin shaped like a caduceus. She has gotten up on the pretext of going to check on little Godfrey, even though Mrs. Goose has him well in hand.
In a small town like Boston, you’d think it would be impossible to have a conversation about anything without being eavesdropped on. Indeed, the whole place was set up to make it so-they deliver the mail, not to your house, but to the nearest tavern, and if you don’t come round and pick it up after a few days the publican will open it up and read it aloud to whomever is in attendance. So Daniel had assumed that Mrs. Goose would be listening in on the whole conversation. But instead she is completely absorbed in her work, as if telling yarns to a boy were more important than this great Decision that Daniel is wrestling with, here at damn near the end of his long life.
“It’s quite all right, my dear,” Daniel says to the back of Faith’s bodice. “Having been raised by a man who believed in Predestination, I’d much rather that my boy was raised by a Free Will woman.” But Faith leaves the room.
Wait Still says, “So… you believe God has predestined you to sail for England tonight?”
“No-I’m not a Calvinist. Now, you’re baffled, Reverend, because you spent too much time at Harvard reading old books about the likes of Calvin and Archbishop Laud, and are still caught up in the disputes of Arminians versus Puritans.”
“What should I have been reading, Doctor?” said Wait Still, making a bit too much of a show of flexibility.
“Galileo, Descartes, Huygens, Newton, Leibniz.”
“The syllabus of your Institute of Technologickal Arts?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t know that you touched on matters of theology.”
“That was a bit of a jab-no, no, quite all right! I rather liked it. I’m pleased by the display of backbone. I can see clearly enough that you’ll end up raising my son.” Daniel means this in a completely non-sexual way-he had in mind that Wait Still would act in some avuncular role-but from the blush on Wait Still’s face he can see that the role of stepfather is more likely.
This, then, would be a good time to change the subject to abstract technical matters: “It all comes from first principles. Everything can be measured. Everything acts according to physical laws. Our minds included. My mind, that’s doing the deciding, is already set in its course, like a ball rolling down a trough.”
“Uncle! Surely you are not denying the existence of souls-of a Supreme Soul.”
Daniel says nothing to this.
“Neither Newton nor Leibniz would agree with you,” Wait Still continues.
“They’re afraid to agree with me, because they are important men, and they would be destroyed if they came out and said it. But no one will bother to destroy me.”
“Can we not influence your mental machine by arguments?” asks Faith, who has returned to stand in the doorway.
Daniel wants to say that Wait Still’s best arguments would be about as influential as boogers flicked against the planking of a Ship of the Line in full sail, but sees no reason to be acrimonious-the whole point of the exercise is to be remembered well by those who’ll stay in the New World, on the theory that as the sun rises on the eastern fringe of America, small things cast long shadows westwards. “The future is as set as the past,” he says, “and the future is that I’ll climb on board the Minerva within the hour. You can argue that I should stay in Boston to raise my son. Of course, I should like nothing better. I should, God willing, have the satisfaction of watching him grow up for as many years as I have left. Godfrey would have a flesh-and-blood father with many conspicuous weaknesses and failings. He’d hold me in awe for a short while, as all boys do their fathers. It would not last. But if I sail away on Minerva, then in place of a flesh-and-blood Dad-a fixed, known quantity-he’ll have a phant’sy of one, infinitely ductile in his mind. I can go away and imagine generations of Waterhouses yet unborn, and Godfrey can imagine a hero-father better than I can really be.”
Wait Still Waterhouse, an intelligent and decent man, can see so many holes in this argument that he is paralyzed by choices. Faith, a better mother than wife, who has a better son than a husband, encompasses a vast sweep of compromises with a pert nod of the head. Daniel gathers up his son from Mrs. Goose’s lap-Enoch calls in a hired coach-they go to the waterfront.
So I saw in my dream that the man began to run. Now he had not run far from his own door, but his wife and children perceiving it began to cry after him to return: but the man put his fingers in his ears, and ran on crying, “Life, life, eternal life.” So he looked not behind him, but fled towards the middle of the plain.
-JOHNBUNYAN,The Pilgrim’s Progress