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I S A A C N E W T O N : PH I L O S O P H I C A L W R I T I N G S
 CAMBRIDGE TEXTS IN THE
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

Series editors
KARL AMERIKS
Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame

DESMOND M. CLARKE
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University College Cork

The main objective of Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy is to expand the
range, variety, and quality of texts in the history of philosophy which are available in
English. The series includes texts by familiar names (such as Descartes and Kant) and
also by less well-known authors. Wherever possible, texts are published in complete and
unabridged form, and translations are specially commissioned for the series. Each
volume contains a critical introduction together with a guide to further reading and
any necessary glossaries and textual apparatus. The volumes are designed for student use
at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and will be of interest not only to students of
philosophy but also to a wider audience of readers in the history of science, the history of
theology, and the history of ideas.

For a list of titles published in the series, please see end of book.
 ISAAC NEWTON

Philosophical Writings
edited by
ANDREW JANIAK
Duke University

Revised Edition
 University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107042384
© Andrew Janiak, 2014
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2004 and reprinted once.
Revised edition first published 2014.
Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Newton, Isaac, 1642–1727.
[Works. Selections. English. 2014]
Isaac Newton, philosophical writings / edited by Andrew Janiak,
Duke University. – Revised Edition.
pages cm. – (Cambridge texts in the history of philosophy)
Includes index.
isbn 978-1-107-04238-4 (Hardback) – isbn 978-1-107-61593-9 (Paperback)
1. Philosophy. I. Janiak, Andrew, editor of compilation. II. Title.
b1299.n32e5 2014
192–dc23 2013045310
isbn 978-1-107-04238-4 Hardback
isbn 978-1-107-61593-9 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
 Contents
Acknowledgments page vi
Introduction vii
Chronology xxxvi
Further reading xxxix
Note on texts and translations xlii

I “New Theory about Light and Colours” [1672] 1

II Correspondence with Robert Boyle [1679] 15
III De Gravitatione [date unknown] 26
IV The Principia [1687, first edition] 59
V “An Account of the System of the World” [c. 1687] 115
VI Correspondence with Richard Bentley [1691–3] 119
VII Correspondence with G. W. Leibniz [1693/1712] 140
VIII Correspondence with Roger Cotes [1713] 153
IX An Account of the Book Entitled Commercium
Epistolicum [1715] 165
X Queries to the Opticks [1721] 169

Index 189

v
 Acknowledgments

The archival work that enabled me to read and transcribe some of the
original versions of the texts published here was made possible by a
generous grant from the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.
For their extremely helpful comments on the earlier version of
the Introduction, I would like to thank several colleagues and friends,
especially Nico Bertoloni Meli, Des Clarke, Mary Domski, Christian
Johnson, Tad Schmaltz, and Richard Stein. I learned most of what
I know about Newton first from Nico Bertoloni Meli and Michael
Friedman, and later from George Smith; I am grateful for all their
guidance over the years. For discussions that influenced the second
version of the Introduction, I thank Lisa Downing, Niccolo Guicciar-
dini, Gary Hatfield, Rob Iliffe, Scott Mandelbrote, Christia Mercer, and
Steve Snobelen. Christian Johnson produced an amended version of the
A. R. and Marie Boas Hall translation of De Gravitatione with my
assistance; I am grateful for his expert work on that difficult text. Since
the time the volume was first proposed, through its final production, my
editors at Cambridge, Des Clarke and Hilary Gaskin, have shown great
patience and much wisdom; they did so once again with the proposal and
production of a second edition.
One couldn’t find a more supportive partner or a better interlocutor
than Rebecca Stein, who always finds time amidst her myriad publishing
projects to talk with me about mine. I’d like to dedicate this volume to
my wonderful mom, Joan Saperstan, and to the memory of my dad,
Chester Janiak (1944–96); I only wish he were here to see it.

vi
 Introduction
In the preceding books I have presented principles of philosophy
that are not, however, philosophical but strictly mathematical - that
is, those on which the study of philosophy can be based. These
principles are the laws and conditions of motions and of forces,
which especially relate to philosophy. But in order to prevent these
principles from becoming sterile, I have illustrated them with some
philosophical scholia, treating topics that are general and that seem
to be the most fundamental for philosophy, such as the density and
resistance of bodies, spaces void of bodies, and the motion of light
and sounds. It still remains for us to exhibit the system of the world
from these same principles.
. . . to treat of God from phenomena is certainly a part of natural
philosophy.
– Isaac Newton1

Newton as natural philosopher

Isaac Newton’s influence is ubiquitous 300 years after his death. We
employ Newtonian mechanics in a wide range of cases, students world-
wide learn the calculus that he co-discovered with Leibniz, and the law of
universal gravitation characterizes what is still considered a fundamental
force. Indeed, the idea that a force can be “fundamental,” irreducible to
any other force or phenomenon in nature, is largely due to Newton, and

1
The first passage is from the preface to Book iii of the Principia, and the second is from its
General Scholium, which was added to the second edition of the text in 1713 (793 and 943 of
Principia, respectively).

vii
 Introduction

still has currency in the twenty-first century. Remarkably, Newton’s

status as a theorist of motion and of forces, and his work as a
mathematician, is equaled by his status as an unparalleled experimentalist.
His experiments in optics, for instance, would be enough to guarantee his
place in the early modern canon. Because of these achievements, Newton
is regularly mentioned along with figures like Copernicus and Galileo as
a founder of modern science. One might even contend that Newton helped
to shape the very idea of the modern “scientist.”
Despite these important facts, we should resist the temptation to
think of Newton as a scientist in any straightforward sense. At a
meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science
in June of 1833, the Cambridge philosopher William Whewell coined
the word “scientist.” At the meeting, Whewell said that, just as the
practitioners of art are called “artists,” the practitioners of science
ought to be called “scientists,” indicating that they should no longer
be called philosophers.2 Indeed, before the early nineteenth century,
people like Newton were called “philosophers,” or, more specifically,
“natural philosophers.” This is not mere semantics. This fact of
linguistic history reflects a deeper conceptual point: during the seven-
teenth century, and well into the eighteenth, figures like Newton
worked within the centuries-old tradition of natural philosophy.3

2
Whewell was responding to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s plea that the members of the British
Association stop calling themselves “natural philosophers,” for the scope of their research had
narrowed considerably in recent years. For details, see Laura Snyder, The Philosophical Breakfast
Club (New York: Broadway, 2011), 1–7. The first time that “scientist” was used in print was a
year later, when Whewell – in an anonymous review – discussed the outcome of the British
Association meeting in his review of Mary Somerville’s book, On the Connexion of the Physical
Sciences (The Quarterly Review 51 [1834], 59). The word “science,” which derives from the Latin
term “scientia” (meaning, roughly, knowledge), has been in continuous use in numerous contexts
since the fourteenth century, but it did not obtain its modern meaning until the mid-to-late
nineteenth century. Thus the new meaning of “science,” referring to the natural sciences
specifically, arose roughly at the time that the word “scientist” was coined (the OED has the
new meaning of “science” first appearing in 1867).
3
Two recent studies of the discipline of natural philosophy are Roger French and Andrew Cunning-
ham, Before Science: The Invention of the Friars’ Natural Philosophy (Brookfield: Scholar’s Press,
1996), and Edward Grant, A History of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2007). For
interpretations of Newton’s work in natural philosophy, see Howard Stein, “Newton’s Metaphys-
ics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Newton, ed. I. Bernard Cohen and George Smith (Cambridge
University Press, 2002), ch. 8, and, more recently, Andrew Janiak, Newton as Philosopher (Cambridge
University Press, 2008), Mary Domski, “Newton’s Empiricism and Metaphysics,” Philosophy
Compass 5 (2010), 525–34, and Steffen Ducheyne, The Main Business of Natural Philosophy
(Dordrecht: Springer, 2012). For a different perspective on Newton’s status as a natural philosopher
or a scientist, see Cohen and Smith’s introduction to the Cambridge Companion, 1–4.

viii
 Introduction

The modern disciplines of physics, chemistry, biology and so on had

not yet been formed. Philosophers who studied nature investigated
such things as planetary motions and the possibility of a vacuum, but
they also discussed many aspects of human beings, including the
psyche, and how nature reflects its divine creator. As the title of
Newton’s magnum opus, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philoso-
phy, suggests, he intended his work to be in dialogue with Descartes’s
Principles of Philosophy (1644), a complex text that includes discus-
sions of everything from the laws of nature to the nature of God’s
causal influence on the world. Just as Descartes had sought to replace
Aristotelian or “Scholastic” methods and doctrines in natural
philosophy, Newton intended his work to replace Descartes’s. It is
therefore illuminating to interpret Newton within the historical
stream of natural philosophy.
Natural philosophy in the Aristotelian traditions of the thirteenth
through the sixteenth centuries involved an analysis of Aristotle’s
ideas about causation within the natural world, especially within the
Christianized context of the medieval period. Philosophers studying
nature were often actually studying texts – such as commentaries on
Aristotle – rather than conducting experiments or engaging in
observations, and they rarely employed mathematical techniques. In
the seventeenth century, natural philosophers like Galileo, Boyle,
Descartes, and Newton began to reject not only the doctrines of the
Aristotelians, but their techniques as well, developing a number of
new mathematical, conceptual and experimental methods. Newton
respected Descartes’s rejection of Aristotelian ideas, but argued that
Cartesians did not employ enough of the mathematical techniques of
Galileo, or of the experimental methods of Boyle, in trying to under-
stand nature. Of course, these developments have often been regarded
as central to the so-called Scientific Revolution. Despite the centrality
of these changes during the seventeenth century, however, the scope
of natural philosophy had not changed. Natural philosophers like
Newton expended considerable energy trying to understand, e.g.,
the nature of motion, but they regarded that endeavor as a component
of an overarching enterprise that also included an analysis of the
divine being.
Newton was a natural philosopher – unlike Descartes, he was not a
founder of modern philosophy, for he never wrote a treatise of the

ix
 Introduction

order of the Meditations. Nonetheless, his influence on philosophy in

the eighteenth century was profound, extending well beyond the
bounds of philosophers studying nature, encompassing numerous
figures and traditions in Britain, on the Continent, and even in the
new world.4 Newton’s influence has at least two salient aspects. First,
Newton’s achievement in the Opticks and in the Principia was under-
stood to be of such philosophical import that few philosophers in the
eighteenth century ignored it. Most of the canonical philosophers in
this period sought to interpret various of Newton’s epistemic claims
within the terms of their own systems, and many saw the coherence of
their own views with those of Newton as a criterion of philosophical
excellence. Early in the century, Berkeley grappled with Newton’s
work on the calculus in The Analyst and with his dynamics in De
Motu, and he even discussed gravity, the paradigmatic Newtonian
force, in his popular work Three Dialogues between Hylas and
Philonous (1713). When Berkeley lists what philosophers take to be
the so-called primary qualities of material bodies in the Dialogues, he
remarkably adds “gravity” to the more familiar list of size, shape,
motion, and solidity, thereby suggesting that the received view of
material bodies had already changed before the second edition of
the Principia had circulated widely. Hume interpreted Newtonian
natural philosophy in an empiricist vein and noted some of its broader
implications in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739) and Enquiry
Concerning Human Understanding (1750). On the Continent, Kant
attempted to forge a philosophically robust mediation between
Leibnizian metaphysics and Newtonian natural philosophy, discussing
Newtonian science at length in his Metaphysical Foundations of
Natural Science (1786).5
Newton’s work also served as the impetus for the extremely influential
correspondence between Leibniz and the Newtonian Samuel Clarke

4
See “Newton and Newtonianism,” a special issue of The Southern Journal of Philosophy 50
(September 2012), edited by Mary Domski, which contains details of Newton’s connections to
figures such as Descartes, Spinoza, Wolff, and Kant. For a broader perspective on Newton’s
influence on the eighteenth century, see “Isaac Newton and the Eighteenth Century,” Enlightenment
and Dissent 25 (2009), ed. Stephen Snobelen.
5
See the detailed account of Kant’s reflections on Newtonian science in Michael Friedman, Kant’s
Construction of Nature: A Reading of the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (Cambridge
University Press, 2012).

x
 Introduction

early in the century, a correspondence that proved significant even for

thinkers writing toward the century’s end. Unlike the vis viva contro-
versy and other disputes between the Cartesians and the Leibnizians,
which died out by the middle of the century, the debate between the
Leibnizians and the Newtonians remained philosophically salient for
decades, serving as the impetus for Emilie Du Châtelet’s influential
work during the French Enlightenment, Foundations of Physics (1740),
and also as one of the driving forces behind Kant’s development of the
“critical” philosophy during the 1770s, culminating in the Critique of
Pure Reason (1781). Newton’s work also spawned an immense commen-
tarial literature in English, French, and Latin, including John Keill’s
Introduction to Natural Philosophy (1726), Henry Pemberton’s A View
of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy (1728), Voltaire’s Elements of the Phil-
osophy of Newton (1738), Willem ’s Gravesande’s Mathematical Elements
of Natural Philosophy (1747), Colin MacLaurin’s An Account of Sir Isaac
Newton’s Philosophical Discoveries (1748), which probably influenced
Hume, and Du Châtelet’s and Clairaut’s commentary on Newton’s
Principia (1759). These and other commentaries were printed in vari-
ous editions, were translated into various languages, and were often
influential.
A second aspect of Newton’s influence involves thinkers who
attempted in one way or another to articulate, follow, or extend, the
Newtonian “method” in natural philosophy when treating issues and
questions that Newton ignored. Euclidean geometry and its methods
were seen as a fundamental epistemic model for much of seventeenth-
century philosophy – Descartes’s Meditations attempts to achieve a type
of certainty he likens to that found in geometry, and Spinoza wrote his
Ethics according to the “geometrical method.” Propositions deduced
from axioms in Euclidean geometry were seen as paradigm cases
of knowledge. We might see Newton’s work as providing eighteenth-
century philosophy with one of its primary models, and with a series of
epistemic exemplars as well. David Hume is perhaps clearest about this
aspect of Newton’s influence. His Treatise of 1739 has the subtitle “An
Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning Into
Moral Subjects,” and there can be little doubt that he meant the method
of the Opticks and the Principia. Indeed, as Hume’s text makes abun-
dantly clear, various eighteenth-century philosophers, including not
only Hume in Scotland but Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the Continent,

xi
 Introduction

were taken to be, or attempted to become, “the Newton of the mind.”6

For Hume, this meant following what he took to be Newton’s empirical
method by providing the proper description of the relevant natural
phenomena and then finding the most general principles that account
for them. This method would allow us to achieve the highest level of
knowledge attainable in the realm of what Hume calls “matters of fact.”7
Despite the influence of Newton’s “method” on eighteenth-century
philosophy, it is obvious that the Principia’s greater impact on the
eighteenth century is to have effected a branching within natural
philosophy that led to the development of mathematical physics on the
one hand, and philosophy on the other. And yet to achieve an under-
standing of how Newton himself approached natural philosophy, we
must carefully bracket such historical developments. Indeed, if we
resist the temptation to understand Newton as working within a well-
established discipline called mathematical physics, if we see him instead
as a philosopher studying nature, his achievement is much more impres-
sive, for instead of contributing to a well-founded field of physics, he
had to begin a process that would eventually lead natural philosophy to
be transformed into a new field of study. This transformation took many
decades, and involved a series of methodological and foundational
debates about the proper means for obtaining knowledge about nature
and its processes. Not only did Newton himself engage in these debates
from his very first publication in optics in 1672, his work in both optics
and in the Principia generated some of the most significant discussions
and controversies in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
These debates concerned such topics as the proper use of hypotheses,
the nature of space and time, and the appropriate rules for conducting
research in natural philosophy. Newton’s achievement was in part to
have vanquished both Cartesian and Leibnizian approaches to natural

6
Surprisingly, Kant declared that Rousseau was “the Newton of the mind” – for discussion, see
Susan Neiman, “Metaphysics, Philosophy: Rousseau on the Problem of Evil,” in Reclaiming the
History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls, ed. Andrews Reath, Barbara Herman and Christine
Korsgaard (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
7
A proposition expressing a matter of fact cannot be known to be true without appeal to experience
because, unlike in the case of “relations of ideas,” the negation of the proposition is not
contradictory. For discussion of Hume’s relation to Newton, with citations to the voluminous
literature on that topic, see Graciela De Pierris, “Newton, Locke and Hume,” in Interpreting
Newton: Critical Essays, ed. Andrew Janiak and Eric Schliesser (Cambridge University Press,
2012).

xii
 Introduction

philosophy; in the eighteenth century, and indeed much of the nine-

teenth, physics was largely a Newtonian enterprise. But this achieve-
ment, from Newton’s own perspective, involved an extensive, lifelong
series of philosophical debates. I discuss several of them in what follows.

Newton’s career and correspondence

Isaac Newton was born into a rural family in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire
on Christmas Day of 1642, the year of Galileo’s death.8 Newton’s
philosophical training and work began early in his intellectual career,
while he was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge in the
early 1660s. The notebooks that survive from that period9 indicate his
wide-ranging interests in topics philosophical, along with a reasonably
serious acquaintance with the great “moderns” of the day, including
Boyle, Hobbes, Gassendi, and especially Descartes. Later in his life,
Newton corresponded directly with a number of significant figures in
natural philosophy, including Boyle, Huygens, and Leibniz, and he
developed personal relations with many others, including Henry More
and John Locke. Newton’s primary works, of course, are Philosophiae
Naturalis Principia Mathematica – or Mathematical Principles of Natural
Philosophy – and the Opticks. Each went through three successive edi-
tions during Newton’s lifetime, which he oversaw under the editorship
of various colleagues, especially Richard Bentley, Samuel Clarke, and
Roger Cotes, two of whom became important Newtonians in their
own right.10

8
By the old calendar; other dates throughout this volume are given according to the new calendar.
9
See J. E. McGuire and Martin Tamny (eds.), Certain Philosophical Questions: Newton’s Trinity
Notebook (Cambridge University Press, 1983).
10
The Principia first appeared in 1687, ran into its third edition in 1726, just before Newton’s
death, and was translated into English by Andrew Motte in 1729; the Motte translation – as
modified by Florian Cajori in a 1934 edition – remained the standard until I. Bernard Cohen and
Anne Whitman published their entirely new version in 1999 (selections in this volume are from
this edition; see the Note on texts and translations below). It also appeared in 1759 in an
influential French translation by Emilie du Châtelet, the famous French Newtonian; remarkably,
her translation remains the standard in French to this day. The Opticks first appeared in 1704,
ran into its third edition in 1721, and was translated into Latin in 1706 by Samuel Clarke,
Newton’s famous defender in the correspondence with Leibniz; the Clarke translation ensured
the text’s accessibility on the Continent. There are many salient differences between Newton’s
two great works despite the tremendous influence each had on subsequent research in their
respective fields in the eighteenth century and beyond. As I. Bernard Cohen has argued,
Newton’s choice of the vernacular rather than Latin for the presentation of his optical views

xiii
 Introduction

In addition to his published works and unpublished manuscripts,

Newton’s correspondence was extensive. It is important to remember
that in Newton’s day, intellectual correspondence was not seen solely, or
perhaps even primarily, as a private affair between two individuals.
It was viewed in much less constrained terms as a type of text that
had an important public dimension, not least because it served as the
primary vehicle of communication for writers separated by what were
then considered to be great distances. As the thousands of letters sent
to and from the Royal Society in Newton’s day testify, science and
philosophy would have ceased without this means of communicating
ideas, results, and questions. It was therefore not at all unusual for letters
between famous writers to be published essentially unedited. The
Leibniz–Clarke correspondence was published almost immediately after
Leibniz’s death in 1716, Newton’s correspondence with Richard
Bentley was published in the mid-eighteenth century, and several of
the letters reprinted in this volume were published in various journals
and academic forums – including the Royal Society’s Philosophical
Transactions – in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.11

Early work in optics

In three significant respects, Newton’s earliest work in optics –
published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
beginning in 1672 – set the stage for important themes of his lifelong
career in natural philosophy. Firstly, Newton’s letter to the Society’s
secretary, Henry Oldenburg, often called the “New theory about light
and colours,” generated an immediate, extensive, and protracted debate
that eventually involved important philosophers such as Robert Hooke
in Britain and Christiaan Huygens, G. W. Leibniz and Ignatius Pardies
on the Continent. Newton consistently regarded these figures not merely

may reflect his opinion that English was more appropriate for a field like optics, which had not
yet achieved the same status as the science of the Principia, in part because it had not yet been
sufficiently mathematized.
11
Of course, there were exceptions: most prominently, perhaps, is Newton’s private correspond-
ence with John Locke concerning “two notable corruptions of Scripture” that concerned the
underpinnings of Newton’s belief that the standard doctrine of the Trinity was a corruption of
the original version of Christianity. See Newton’s extremely long letter of November 14, 1690 in
The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, ed. Herbert Turnbull, John Scott, A. R. Hall, and Laura
Tilling (Cambridge University Press, 1959–77), vol. iii, 83–129.

xiv
 Introduction

as disagreeing with his views, but as misinterpreting them. This experience

helped to shape Newton’s famous and lifelong aversion to intellectual
controversy, a feature of his personality that he often mentioned in letters,
and one that he would never outgrow. Secondly, because Newton regarded
himself as misinterpreted by his critics, he had recourse to meta-level
or methodological discussions of the practice of optics and of the kinds
of knowledge that philosophers can obtain when engaging in experiments
with light. The novelty and power of Newton’s work in the Principia
years later would eventually generate similar controversies that led Newton
to analogous kinds of methodological discussions of his experimental
practice within natural philosophy and of the kinds of knowledge that
one can obtain in that field using either experimental or mathematical
techniques. From our point of view, Newton’s science was unusually
philosophical for these reasons. Thirdly and finally, in his earliest optical
work Newton began to formulate a distinction that would remain salient
throughout his long intellectual career, contending that a philosopher
must distinguish between a conclusion or claim about some feature of
nature that is derived from experimental or observational evidence, and a
conclusion or claim that is a mere “hypothesis,” a kind of speculation
about nature that is not, or not yet anyway, so derived. Newton’s much
later proclamation in the second edition of the Principia (1713), “Hypotheses
non fingo,” or “I feign no hypotheses,” would infuriate his critics just as
much as it would prod his followers into making the pronouncement a
central component of a newly emerging Newtonian method.
The field of optics has its origins in the Ancient Greek period, when
figures like Euclid and Ptolemy wrote works on the subject, but they
focused less on light than on the science of vision, analyzing (e.g.) the
visual rays that were sometimes thought to extrude from the eye, enab-
ling it to perceive distant physical objects. In the early modern period,
Kepler and Descartes each made fundamental contributions to the field,
including the discovery of the inversion of the retinal image (in the
former case) and an explanation of refraction (in the latter case).
Newton’s work helped to shift the focus of optics from an analysis of
vision to an investigation of light. In “New Theory about Light and
Colours,” published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1672, Newton
presented a number of experiments in which sunlight was allowed to
pass through one or two prisms in order to probe some of its basic
features. But what counts as a feature of light? Numerous philosophers

xv
 Introduction

during the seventeenth century, including Hooke and Huygens,

developed doctrines concerning the fundamental physical nature of light
in answer to the question: is light a stream of particles (or “corpuscles”), or
is it a wave? This question obviously continued to have relevance into the
twentieth century, when wave-particle duality was discovered. In his
experiments with the prism, however, Newton sought to investigate
something else, viz. what he calls “the celebrated Phenomena of Colours.”
Newton’s various prism experiments, which he describes in considerable
depth, suggested to him a “Doctrine” that he expresses in thirteen
consecutive numbered propositions. Included in these propositions are
the following claims about features of rays of light: first, the rays of light
that emerge when sunlight passes through a prism exhibit various colors;
second, these colors differ in their “degrees of Refrangibility,” which
means that they exhibit and retain an index of refraction, even when they
are passed through a second prism; third, these colors – or colorful rays –
are not modifications of sunlight itself, but rather are “Original and connate
properties” of it; and, fourth, this means that although ordinary sunlight
appears white, or perhaps colorless, to our perception, it actually contains
numerous colors within it, which can be experimentally revealed.
Newton’s paper exhibits what a contemporary reader would regard as
an intriguing blend of experimental evidence and philosophical argu-
mentation. The latter hinges on Newton’s interpretation of the concept
of a property or a quality, as the following passage, which follows the
“Doctrine” expressed in thirteen propositions, tellingly reveals:

These things being so, it can be no longer disputed, whether there

be colours in the dark, nor whether they be the qualities of the
objects we see, no nor perhaps, whether Light be a Body. For, since
Colours are the qualities of Light, having its Rays for their entire
and immediate subject, how can we think those Rays qualities also,
unless one quality may be the subject of and sustain another; which
in effect is to call it substance. We should not know Bodies for
substances, were it not for their sensible qualities, and the Principal
of those being now found due to something else, we have as good
reason to believe that to be a substance also. (This volume, p. 11)

Newton argues as follows here: since rays of light have colors as basic
features, we should regard these colors as qualities or properties of the
rays; but doing so requires us to think of the rays as bearers of qualities,

xvi
 Introduction

which is to say, as substances in their own right. And if rays of light are
substances, this means that we cannot also think of them as qualities or
properties of anything else – a point that follows from a widely accepted
notion of a substance at the time, one easily found in Descartes, among
others.12 And if we cannot think of rays of light as properties or qualities,
then they are not waves, for waves are features of some medium (think
of waves on the surface of a lake). Light must be a stream of particles.
This line of argument became one of the centerpieces of the debate
that Newton’s paper generated. In some parts of his paper, when
Newton wrote of the “rays” of light, he had evidently intended to remain
neutral on whether the rays are particles or waves (this is reminiscent
of the ancient Greek practice of avoiding physical discussions of visual
rays). But then toward the paper’s end, Newton added his new line
of argument, which employed some philosophical analysis together with
some experimental evidence to support the conclusion that rays of
light cannot be waves after all. Newton’s critics pounced. This led to
the first problem he encountered in response to his paper: what he calls
his “theory” of light and colors was not merely rejected, but rather
immediately misunderstood, at least from his own perspective. Just days
after Newton’s paper was read at the Royal Society, Robert Hooke
responded with a detailed letter to Oldenburg. In the first few sentences,
Hooke indicates that, from his point of view, Newton’s “Hypothesis of
saving the phenomena of colours” essentially involves the contention
that rays of light are particulate, rather than wavelike.13 Hooke argues, in
contrast, that light “is nothing but a pulse or motion propagated through
an homogeneous, uniform and transparent medium;” that is, he argues
that light is indeed wavelike. He makes it perfectly clear, moreover, that
his hypothesis can save the phenomena of colours just as well as
Newton’s, which is to say, that his hypothesis is compatible with the
experimental evidence Newton gathers. Evidently, the line of argument
in the passage quoted above caught Hooke’s eye. Among philosophers,

12
Newton would have been familiar with the discussion of substances in Descartes, Principles of
Philosophy, part i: §§51–53.
13
See Hooke to Oldenburg, February 15, 1671/2, in Correspondence of Isaac Newton, vol. i, 113. In
recounting Newton’s theory, Hooke does mention the points about refrangibility and heterogen-
eity, but he thinks that Newton’s “first proposition” is “that light is a body” and that differently
colored rays of light are in fact “several sorts of bodies.” I take this to represent Hooke’s
interpretation of how Newton can account for the data with the theory that light consists of
particles.

xvii
 Introduction

he was not alone. In a letter to Huygens explaining Newton’s theory of

light, Leibniz writes that Newton takes light to be a “body” propelled
from the sun to the earth which, according to Leibniz, Newton takes
to explain both the differential refrangibility of rays of light and the
phenomena of colors.14
After the extensive correspondence, and controversy, generated in
response to Newton’s early optical views and experiments, he often
threatened to avoid engaging in mathematical and philosophical disputes
altogether. He insisted to friends and colleagues that he found intellec-
tual controversy unbearable. Fortunately for us, he never followed
through with his threat to disengage from discussions in natural phil-
osophy, and sent many important letters in his later years. One of his
more important pieces of correspondence after the optics controversy
was with the natural philosopher Robert Boyle in 1679 (Newton’s letter
was published for the first time in the mid-eighteenth century).15 In his
lengthy letter to Boyle, Newton presents his speculations concerning
various types of what we would now call chemical interactions; many
of these speculations bear similarities to passages that appeared years
later in the queries to the Opticks. The letter is also famous for presenting
one of Newton’s early speculations concerning how gravity might be
physically explained; it presents, among other things, a picture of
what Newton would countenance as a viable explanation of gravity in
physical terms. This issue became of paramount importance once the
Principia appeared.

Newton’s relation to Descartes

Like many philosophers who worked in the wake of Galileo and of
Descartes, Newton never seriously analyzed Aristotelian ideas about

14
In Oeuvres complètes de Christiaan Huygens, ed. Johan Adriaan Vollgraff (The Hague: Nijhoff,
1888–1950), vol. x, 602. Ignatius Pardies, another of Newton’s interlocutors, similarly found it
difficult to differentiate the claim about the corporeal nature of light from Newton’s ideas
concerning refrangibility and heterogeneity. See his two letters to the Royal Society
concerning Newton’s work, both of which are reprinted in Isaac Newton’s Papers and Letters
on Natural Philosophy, ed. I. Bernard Cohen and Robert Schofield, revised edn (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1978,); cf. the discussion of Pardies in A. I. Sabra, Theories of Light
from Descartes to Newton, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 1981), 264–7.
15
The letter to Boyle first appeared in The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, ed. Thomas Birch
(London, 1744), vol. i, 70–4.

xviii
 Introduction

nature. As is especially clear from the unpublished anti-Cartesian tract,

De Gravitatione (see below), Newton expended considerable energy
engaging with Cartesian ideas,16 and when he published the first edition
of the Principia in 1687, Cartesianism remained the reigning view in
natural philosophy and served as the backdrop for much important
research.17 This feature of the intellectual landscape persisted for many
years: Cotes’s famous and influential preface to the second edition of the
Principia – see chapter iv below – indicates that Cartesianism remained a
primary competitor to Newton’s natural philosophy in 1713. Despite the
astonishing impact that Newton’s work had on various fields, including
of course what we would call philosophy proper, it would be anachronistic
to conclude that Newtonianism had replaced its primary competitor, for
Cartesianism’s influence did not dissipate until some time after Newton’s
death in 1727.
As De Gravitatione shows, Newton not only read Descartes’s Principles
of Philosophy carefully, he attempted to refute some of the central notions
in that text. De Gravitatione raises a number of controversial interpretive
issues, including first and foremost the provenance of the text itself.
No consensus has emerged as to the dating of the manuscript – which
remained unpublished until 1962 – and there is insufficient evidence
for that question to be answered as of now,18 but two things remain clear:

16
In his library, Newton had a 1656 Amsterdam edition of Descartes’s Principles, along with a 1664
London edition of the Meditations. On Newton’s relation to Descartes and to Cartesianism, see
the classic treatments in the chapter “Newton and Descartes” in Alexandre Koyré, Newtonian
Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), and in Stein, “Newton’s
Metaphysics.”
17
See John Heilbron, Elements of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1982), 30. Even in Newton’s home university, Cambridge, and alma mater, Trinity College, his
works and ideas did not displace those of the Cartesians within the standard curriculum until
roughly 1700; indeed, Cartesianism was so popular that the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge
University, Edmund Boldero, decreed in November 1688 that undergraduates could no longer
base their disputations on Descartes, but had to use Aristotle instead (see John Gascoigne,
Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1985), 54–5 and 143–5).
Part of the shift toward Newtonian ideas reflected the growing influence of Richard Bentley, who
became Master of Trinity in 1700, a post he retained for decades. Roger Cotes, whom Bentley
chose to be the editor of the second edition of the Principia in 1709, entered Trinity in 1699 and
became a fellow in 1705.
18
The text first appeared, in a transcription of the original Latin and an English translation, in
Unpublished Scientific Writings of Isaac Newton, ed. A. R. Hall and Marie Boas Hall (Cambridge
University Press, 1962). In the Halls’ judgment, the text is juvenile and probably originates in the
period from 1664 to 1668. In an influential interpretation, Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs contends, in
contrast, that the work is mature and was written in late 1684 or early 1685, while Newton was
preparing the first edition of the Principia. See Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of

xix
 Introduction

first, the text is an extended series of criticisms of Cartesian natural

philosophy; and, second, it is significant for understanding Newton’s
thought, not least because it represents a sustained philosophical discus-
sion. De Gravitatione helps to dispel the easily informed impression that
Newton sought, in the Principia, to undermine a Leibnizian conception
of space and time, as his defender, Samuel Clarke, would attempt to
do years later in the correspondence of 1715–16. Although Leibniz did
eventually express what became the canonical early modern formulation
of relationalism concerning space and time – the view, roughly, that
space is nothing but the order of relations among physical objects, and
time nothing over and above the succession of events involving those
objects – and although Newton and Clarke were highly skeptical of such
a view, it is misleading to read the Principia through the lens provided by
the later controversy with the Leibnizians. Newton’s extensive attempt
in De Gravitatione to refute Descartes’s conception of space and time in
particular indicates that the Scholium should be read as providing a
replacement for the Cartesian conception.19 Newton had a Cartesian,
and not a Leibnizian, opponent primarily in mind when he wrote his
famous articulation of “absolutism” concerning space and time. It may
be thought a measure of Newton’s success against his Cartesian
predecessors that history records a debate between the Leibnizians and
the Newtonians as influencing every subsequent discussion of space
and time in the eighteenth century and beyond.

Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy

As is the stuff of legend, in August of 1684, Edmond Halley – for whom
the comet is named – came to visit Newton in Cambridge in order to
discover his opinion about a subject of much dispute in celestial
mechanics. At this time, many in the Royal Society and elsewhere were
at work on a cluster of problems that might be described as follows: how

Alchemy in Newton’s Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 141–6, where she also reviews
various alternative opinions on the matter. In a recent essay, Jim Ruffner raises important doubts
concerning earlier interpretations, concluding that the text must have been written before
Halley’s famous visit to Newton in 1684 – see “Newton’s De gravitatione: A Review and
Reassessment,” Archive for the History of the Exact Sciences 66 (2012).
19
Stein presents this interpretation of Newton’s Principia in his classic essay, “Newtonian Space-
Time,” in The Annus Mirabilis of Sir Isaac Newton 1666–1966, ed. Robert Palter (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1970).

xx
 Introduction

can one take Kepler’s Laws, which were then considered among the very
best descriptions of the planetary orbits, and understand them in the
context of dynamical or causal principles? What kind of cause – for
some, what kind of force – would lead to planetary orbits of the kind
described by Kepler? In particular, Halley asked Newton the following
question: what kind of curve would a planet describe in its orbit around
the sun if it were acted upon by an attractive force that was inversely
proportional to the square of its distance from the sun? Newton imme-
diately replied that the curve would be an ellipse (rather than, say, a
circle).20 Halley was amazed that Newton had the answer at the ready.
But Newton also said that he had mislaid the paper on which the relevant
calculations had been made, so Halley left empty handed. He would
not be disappointed for long. In November of that year, Newton sent
Halley a nine-page paper, entitled De Motu (on motion), that presented
the sought-after demonstration, along with several other advances in
celestial mechanics. Halley was delighted, and immediately returned to
Cambridge for further discussion. It was these events that precipitated
the many drafts of De Motu that eventually became Principia mathematica
by 1686. Several aspects of the Principia have been central to philosoph-
ical discussions since its first publication, including Newton’s novel
methodology in the book, his conception of space and time, and his
attitude toward the dominant orientation within natural philosophy in
his day, the so-called mechanical philosophy.

Methodology
When Newton wrote the Principia between 1684 and 1686, he was not
contributing to a preexisting field of study called mathematical physics;
he was attempting to show how philosophers could employ various
mathematical and experimental methods in order to reach conclusions
about nature, especially about the motions of material bodies. In his

20
Although astronomers for centuries had thought that the planetary orbits must be circular, for
various important reasons, in the seventeenth century Kepler had argued that they are in fact
elliptical (although this is consistent with the idea, which became important in later contexts, that
the orbits are nearly circular). This innovation proved to be crucial for later work in celestial
mechanics. Ellipses are figures in which a straight line from the center to any arbitrary point on
the surface does not describe a single radius that is equal in length to all other radii. So they are
more difficult to deal with geometrically than circles.

xxi
 Introduction

lectures presented as the Lucasian Professor, Newton had been arguing

since at least 1670 that natural philosophers had to employ geometrical
methods in order to understand various phenomena in nature.21 The
Principia represented his attempt to reorient natural philosophy, taking
it in a direction that neither his Aristotelian predecessors, nor his
Cartesian contemporaries, had envisioned. He did not immediately
convince many of them of the benefits of his approach. Just as his first
publication in optics in 1672 had sparked an intense debate about the
proper methods for investigating the nature of light – and much else
besides – his Principia sparked an even longer-lasting discussion about
the methodology that philosophers should adopt when studying the
natural world. This discussion began immediately with the publication
of the Principia, and intensified considerably with the publication of its
second edition in 1713, since many of Newton’s alterations in that
edition involved changes in his presentation of his methods. Discussions
of methodology would eventually involve nearly all of the leading
philosophers in England and on the Continent during Newton’s lifetime.
Unlike Descartes, Newton placed the concept of a force at the very
center of his thinking about motion and its causes within nature. In that
regard, his reactions to the shortcomings of Cartesian natural philosophy
parallel Leibniz’s, who coined the term “dynamics.” But Newton’s
attitude toward understanding the forces of nature involved an especially
intricate method that generated intense scrutiny and debate amongst
many philosophers and mathematicians, including Leibniz.22 Newton’s
canonical notion of a force, which he calls a vis impressa or “impressed
force,” is the notion of an “action exerted on a body” that changes its
state of motion. This was a confusing notion at the time. If you throw me
a ball and I catch it, I have impressed a force on the ball, since I have
changed its state of motion. We have a good idea of what I am, and of
what the ball is, but what exactly is this “force” that I impressed on it?
Is the force some physical item? Is it not physical? It does not seem likely
that a force is itself a physical thing, or a substance, to use a philosophical
notion popular in Newton’s day (as we saw above in his first optics

21
See the “Lectiones opticae” of 1670 in The Optical Papers of Isaac Newton, ed. Alan Shapiro
(Cambridge University Press, 1984), vol. i, 86–7.
22
See Daniel Garber, “Leibniz, Newton and Force,” in Interpreting Newton, ed. Janiak and
Schliesser, ch. 2.

xxii
 Introduction

paper). In Definition Four in the Principia, which defines an impressed

force for the first time, Newton remarks: “This force consists solely in
the action and does not remain in a body after the action has ceased.”
So when I caught the ball, the force I impressed on it was the action of
catching the ball, or an action associated with catching the ball, and not a
property of me or of the ball after the action ceased. This idea confused
many of Newton’s readers. By the mid-eighteenth century, the time
of Hume’s analysis of causation in the Treatise and the Enquiry, many
philosophers had started to think that actions and other kinds of event
are important items to have in one’s ontology, and they often contended
that causal relations hold between events. But in Newton’s day,
philosophers typically regarded objects or substances as the causal relata.
So actions were difficult to analyze or often left out of analyses.
Newton did try to clarify his method of characterizing forces. If
one brackets the question of how to understand forces as ephemeral
actions that do not persist after causal interactions have ceased, one can
make progress by conceiving of forces as quantities. In particular, since
Newton’s eight definitions and three laws indicate that forces are pro-
portional to mass and acceleration, and since mass – or the quantity
of matter – and acceleration are both quantities that can be measured,
Newton gives us a means of measuring forces. This is crucial to his
method. If one thinks of forces as measurable quantities, moreover, then
one can attempt to identify two seemingly disparate forces as in fact the
same force through thinking about measuring them. Newton does this in
Book iii of the Principia, when he argues in proposition 5 and its
Scholium that the centripetal force maintaining the planetary orbits is
in fact gravity, viz., the force that causes the free fall of objects on earth.
This culminates in the claim in proposition 7 that all bodies gravitate
toward one another in proportion to their quantity of matter. This
helped to unify what were once called superlunary and sublunary
phenomena, a unification that was obviously crucial for later research
in physics.
Despite his evident success in obtaining what we now call the law of
universal gravitation, Newton admits that he lacks another kind of
knowledge about gravity. In the General Scholium, he reminds his
readers that gravity is proportional to a body’s quantity of matter (its
mass) and reaches across vast distances within our solar system, adding:
“I have not as yet been able to deduce from phenomena the reason for

xxiii
 Introduction

these properties of gravity, and I do not feign hypotheses.”23 With this

phrase, one of the most famous in all of Newton’s writings, he returned
to a key theme of his very first optical paper from forty years earlier, viz.
the proper role of hypotheses and of hypothetical reasoning within
natural philosophy.24 Some of Newton’s interpreters have regarded this
phrase as signaling a strong commitment to the broad doctrine that all
hypotheses concerning natural phenomena ought to be avoided on
principle. This interpretation is sometimes coupled with the view that
some British philosophers in the late seventeenth century regarded
Cartesianism as overly reliant on hypotheses in reaching conclusions
about phenomena. But this interpretation may be hard to square with
Newton’s texts. For instance, in the Scholium to proposition 96 of Book
i of the Principia, Newton discusses hypotheses concerning light rays.
Similarly, in query 21 of the Opticks (this volume, p. 170), he proposes
that there might be an aether whose differential density accounts for the
gravitational force acting between bodies. In light of such examples,
one can read the General Scholium’s pronouncement in this way: a
philosopher concerned with explaining some feature of nature – such
as the fact that gravity is inversely proportional to the square of spatial
separation, rather than, say, the cube – may legitimately entertain and
propose hypotheses for consideration by his readers, but he may not
“feign” the hypothesis in the sense of taking it as having been established
either through experiment, observation, or some form of reasoning.
Hence Newton thinks that he has established the fact that gravity acts on
all material bodies in proportion to their quantity of matter, but he has not
established the existence of the aether. By the time of the General
Scholium, Newton was increasingly embroiled in philosophical disputes
with Leibniz. In order to account for the motions of the planetary bodies in
his Tentamen of 1690, Leibniz introduces ex hypothesi the premise that
some kind of fluid surrounds, and is contiguous to, the various planetary
bodies, and then argues that this fluid must be in motion to account for

23
We owe this translation of the phrase to Alexandre Koyré, who first noted that Newton uses the
word “feign” in a parallel discussion in English: From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957), 229 and 299 n. 12.
24
For an influential discussion of the development in Newton’s conception of hypotheses over
time, see I. Bernard Cohen, “Hypotheses in Newton’s Philosophy,” Physis: Rivista Internazio-
nale di Storia della Scienza 8 (1966), 163–84.

xxiv
 Introduction

their orbits.25 Newton would have argued that Leibniz had “feigned” the
hypothesis of the vortices. A debate between the two philosophers on this
score would bring them to the question of the mechanical philosophy:
whereas Newton might object to Leibniz’s reasoning on methodological
grounds, Leibniz might reply that Newton’s theory of gravity involves
action at a distance, which his vortex hypothesis avoids (see below).
In addition to the General Scholium, the second edition of the
Principia also included what Newton called “regulae philosophandi,”
or rules of philosophy (this volume, p. 108), which became the focal
point of vigorous discussion and debate well into the eighteenth century.
The first two rules concern causal reasoning, but it is the third rule that
generated the most debate, for it involved both an aspect of Newton’s
controversial argument for universal gravity and also a rare public
statement by Newton of what he regarded as the “foundation” of natural
philosophy. The third rule concerns an induction problem: we have
perceptions and experiments that provide us with knowledge of
the objects and natural phenomena in our neck of the universe, but on
what basis can we reach a conclusion concerning objects and phenomena
throughout the rest of the universe? Newton himself reached such a
conclusion about gravity in proposition 7 of Book iii of the Principia.
Part of Newton’s answer is presented in rule 3: “Those qualities of
bodies that cannot be intended and remitted [i.e., increased and dimin-
ished] and that belong to all bodies on which experiments can be made
should be taken as qualities of all bodies universally” (this volume,
p. 109). We know, say, that a clump of dirt has certain qualities such
as extension and mobility, but how do we know that the entire earth has
such qualities? It surely lies beyond the reach of our experiments, or at
any rate, it did in Newton’s day. Newton says that the sun and the earth
interact according to his law of gravity, but how do we know that the sun
contains a quantity of matter, that it is a material body with the same
basic qualities that characterize the earth or the moon? Newton thinks
that gravity reaches into the very center of the sun, but what did anyone
in 1713 know about such things? Newton glosses his third rule in part as
follows, connecting it with his laws of motion:

25
See the Tentamen in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Mathematische Schriften, ed. C. Gerhardt
(Berlin, 1849), vol. vi, 149, and Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Equivalence and Priority: Newton
vs. Leibniz (Oxford University Press, 1993), 128–9.

xxv
 Introduction

That all bodies are movable and persevere in motion or in rest by

means of certain forces (which we call forces of inertia) we infer
from finding these properties in the bodies that we have seen. The
extension, hardness, impenetrability, mobility, and force of
inertia26 of the whole arise from the extension, hardness,
impenetrability, mobility, and force of inertia of each of the parts;
and thus we conclude that every one of the least parts of all bodies
is extended, hard, impenetrable, movable, and endowed with a
force of inertia. And this is the foundation of all natural
philosophy. (this volume, p. 109)
Many of Newton’s readers in 1713 would have granted him the
following inference: although we do not have any perceptions of, say,
the interior of the earth, or even of many ordinary objects within
our grasp, we can reasonably infer that everything with certain basic
properties – something akin to what John Locke, borrowing a term of
Robert Boyle’s, called the “primary qualities” – at the macroscopic level
is comprised of micro-particles that are characterized by those same basic
properties. But at the end of his gloss of Rule 3, Newton applies this
same (or analogous) reasoning to the force of gravity, arguing as follows:
since we experience the fact that all bodies on or near the earth gravitate
toward the earth – in cases such as free fall – and that the moon gravitates
toward the earth, etc., we can infer that all bodies everywhere gravitate
toward all other bodies. This argument would appear to suggest that
gravity, which, as we have seen, is a kind of impressed force, an action, is
somehow akin to qualities like extension and impenetrability. So is
Newton suggesting that gravity is actually a quality of all bodies? This
question became the subject of intense debate and remains so today.

The mechanical philosophy

Newton’s second law indicates that a body moving rectilinearly will
continue to do so unless a force is impressed on it. This is not equivalent
to claiming that a body moving rectilinearly will continue to do so unless
another body impacts upon it. A vis impressa – an impressed force – in
Newton’s system is not the same as a body, as we have seen; but what is

26
This is a potentially confusing way of referring to the mass – specifically, what we would call the
inertial mass – of a body. See Definition Three in this volume, p. 80.

xxvi
 Introduction

more, some impressed forces need not involve contact between bodies
at all. For instance, gravity is a kind of centripetal force, and the latter,
in turn, is a species of impressed force. Hence a body moving in a straight
line will continue to do so until it experiences a gravitational pull, even
if no body impacts upon it. Indeed, the gravitational pull might originate
with a mass that is millions of miles away. As we have seen, an impressed
force is an action exerted on a body. Hence the gravity exerted on a
moving body is an action (the Latin term is actio), which is obviously a
causal notion. This is not an empirical claim per se; it is merely a reflection
of Newton’s laws, together with his notion of an impressed force, and his
further idea that gravity is one kind of impressed force. These elements
of the Principia make conceptual room for a causal interaction between
two bodies separated by a vast distance. This became known in philo-
sophical circles as the problem of action at a distance.27
Many of Newton’s most influential contemporaries objected vigorously
to the fact that his philosophy had made room for – if not explicitly
defended – the possibility of distant action between material bodies.
Leibniz and Huygens in particular rejected this aspect of Newton’s work
in the strongest terms, and it remained a point of contention between
Newton and Leibniz for the rest of their lives (see below). Both Leibniz
and Huygens were convinced that all natural change occurs through contact
action, and that any deviation from this basic mechanist principle within
natural philosophy would lead to serious difficulties, including the revival
of outmoded Aristotelian ideas. By the seventh proposition of Book iii
of the Principia, as we have seen, Newton reached the following conclu-
sion: “Gravity acts on all bodies universally and is proportional
to the quantity of matter in each.” Leibniz eventually accused Newton
of regarding gravity as a kind of “occult quality,” that is, as a quality
of bodies that is somehow hidden within them and beyond the
philosopher’s understanding. Newton’s gloss on Rule 3 only made matters
worse from Leibniz’s point of view, since it tacitly (or functionally) treats
gravity as a kind of universal quality akin to extension or impenetrability.
But unlike them, it was occult, imperceptible and unintelligible.
One would think that the criticisms of Leibniz and Huygens – both of
whom were held in high regard by Newton early in his career – would

27
For a classic treatment, see Mary Hesse, Forces and Fields: The Concept of Action at a Distance in
the History of Physics (London: Nelson, 1961).

xxvii
 Introduction

have pressed Newton into articulating an extensive defense of the possibil-

ity of action at a distance. Newton presented no such defense; moreover,
there is actually evidence that Newton himself rejected the possibility
of action at a distance, despite the fact that the Principia allows it as a
conceptual possibility, if not an empirical reality. When Richard
Bentley – later to become an important colleague of Newton and the Master
of Newton’s college in Cambridge – gave the first lectures on Christianity
endowed by a bequest in Robert Boyle’s will in late 1691, he sought
Newton’s advice in what became a celebrated correspondence (it is repro-
duced in this volume). Bentley’s aim was to argue against atheism in part
by appealing to the philosophical and theological consequences of what
was at the time the newest theory of nature in England, viz., Newton’s.
In the course of explaining his views to Bentley, Newton made the following
(now famous, if not infamous) pronouncement in a letter of 1693:
It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the
mediation of something else which is not material, operate upon
and affect other matter without mutual contact . . . That gravity
should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body
may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the
mediation of anything else, by and through which their action
and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so
great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical
matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.
(This volume p. 137)
It certainly seems that Newton is uncomfortable with the very idea of
action at a distance, although some historians and philosophers have
argued strongly that there are other readings of the letter.28 Rather than
rejecting distant action between material bodies per se, he may have been
rejecting a particular version of that idea. One motive for uncovering a

28
Indeed, in recent years there has been a robust debate about the correspondence with Bentley in
particular, and about Newton’s attitude toward action at a distance in general, with many
interpreters criticizing the account in Janiak, Newton as Philosopher. See, e.g., Steffen Ducheyne,
“Newton on Action at a Distance and the Cause of Gravity,” Studies in History and Philosophy of
Science 42 (2011), 154–9; John Henry, “Gravity and De Gravitatione: The Development of
Newton’s Ideas on Action at a Distance,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 42 (2011),
11–27; and Eric Schliesser, “Newton’s Substance Monism, Distant Action, and the Nature of
Newton’s Empiricism,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 42 (2011), 160–6. Cf. Janiak’s
reply to their criticisms in “Three Concepts of Cause in Newton,” Studies in History and
Philosophy of Science 44 (2013): 397–407.

xxviii
 Introduction

nuanced interpretation of this letter is the obvious fact that Newton appar-
ently regarded action at a distance as perfectly possible when writing
the Principia. It is difficult to reconcile the Principia with the Bentley
correspondence. One can argue that although he left open the possibility
of action at a distance in his main work, Newton himself did not accept
that possibility. The debate on such matters continues unabated.

Space and the divine

Unlike questions about Newton’s methods and his apparent deviation
from the norms established by mechanist philosophers like Descartes
and Boyle, Newton’s conception of space and time, along with his view
of the divine being, did not immediately engender a philosophical
debate. It was Leibniz more than any other philosopher who eventually
succeeded in fomenting a philosophical debate in which the “Newtonian”
conception of space, time, and the divine would play a central role (see
below). But Leibniz’s philosophical views were relatively unknown when
Newton first formed his conception, and Newton never took Aristotelian
philosophical views very seriously. It was instead Descartes’s view of
space, the world, and God, which he pondered in his youth, and like
many contemporaries in Cambridge in those days, he encountered
them within the context of Henry More’s then famous discussions of
Cartesianism (a term coined by More). Beginning with his correspond-
ence with Descartes in 1648, and continuing with a series of publications
in later years, many of which Newton owned in his personal library,
More argued that Descartes made two fundamental mistakes: first, he
wrongly contended that extension and matter are identical (and that
the world is therefore a plenum); and second, he mistakenly believed
that God and the mind were not extended substances, which made
their causal interactions with such substances mysterious. Just as Prin-
cess Elisabeth of Bohemia raised fundamental objections to Cartesian
dualism, More raised similar objections against the Cartesian view of the
divine.29 Descartes agreed with More’s suggestion that God can act

29
See Lisa Shapiro (ed.), The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René
Descartes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), and Genevieve Lewis (ed.), Descartes:
Correspondance avec Arnauld et Morus, texte Latin et traduction (Paris: Librairie philosophique
Vrin, 1953).

xxix
Another random document with
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was shorter than she, and had a short-cropped red head. She was not a pretty child, but there was
something wild and graceful in the way she held herself. She eyed Diana and her mother as a young
fawn might just before taking flight, but Mrs. Inglefield smiled at her tenderly and held out her hand:

"Are you a little wood nymph? Come and talk to us."

The little girl stood still. She was not a village child. She was dressed plainly but well, and she swung
a straw hat in her hand as she walked. Her face had been furious with passion, but surprise and
curiosity had taken the temper away. For an instant she wavered, as if meditating flight, and then she
thought better of it and walked up to Mrs. Inglefield.

"I saw you in church on Sunday," she said. "You smiled so often! I never know people who smile."

"Oh, what a sad pity! How hot and tired you look, dear child! Come and sit down by me."

CHAPTER VI
Inez Appears

The little girl seated herself at the extreme end of the tree-trunk; she looked at Diana with a frown.
Diana held out her hand, full of primroses and bluebells.

"Have a nosegay?"' she asked.

A shake of the head was the only answer given, and then suddenly the little stranger burst forth:

"I've run away, and I mean to stay away. They all hate me, and I hate them. And Julia is the worst of
all. She's a murderer; she drowned my puppy and held my hands tight when I tried to save him. She
drowned him in the water-butt and laughed all the time, and, oh, he thought I would save him. He
looked at me, and he was such a darling!"

"The wicked woman!" exclaimed Diana, roused to quick indignation.

The little girl buried her face in her hands and sobbed as if her heart would break.

Mrs. Inglefield moved closer to her and put her motherly arms round her.

"My poor little girl, tell me a little more. What is your name? And where do you live?"

"My name is Inez. I used to live in London with Dad and Mother and I was happy there, for I had a
kind Nanny. And then she went away and Julia came. And Dad and Mother are out in Spain, and our
house in London is shut up, and Mother said it would do me good to come down to the country and
stay at the Park with Julia."

She wiped her eyes and regarded Diana with interest. "I'd like to know you," she said; "I haven't any
friends here at all, not one!"

"You will have to come and see us," said Mrs. Inglefield. "Would you be allowed to?"
"Julia doesn't care where I go, she only dresses me and puts me to bed; she's going to marry Jim the
under-gardener, I think. She's always with him in the garden. Mrs. Ball is the crossest cook I've ever
seen. She hates children, always did, she says, so she hates me, and the other maids always tell me
to get out of their way. Sometimes they're kind, but I keep away from them all. I like climbing trees
and making bows and arrows. I only shoot at targets on trees. I love the birds—I've a tame robin who
comes into the nursery. I call him Jack."

Inez was brightening up as she talked.

Then Mrs. Inglefield said that she and Diana must go on to the farm. Inez asked if she might
accompany them.

"I told Julia I should run away and kill myself, and never be heard of again," she remarked
thoughtfully, "but now I've met you, I don't think I'll do that."

"I'm quite sure you wouldn't really be so foolish and naughty as to try to hurt yourself, because
somebody else had done it," said Mrs. Inglefield gravely.

Diana looked quite shocked.

"I don't care what I do when I'm in a temper," said Inez carelessly. "I fight Julia. I pulled all her hair
down one day."

"Don't tell us of the naughty things you do, for we don't want to feel unhappy, but tell us of the good
things you do," said Mrs. Inglefield cheerfully.

"I'm not a bit good," said Inez, "never!"

"Then you can't be a happy little girl."

Inez was silent, then she began to chatter to Diana, and Mrs. Inglefield let the children talk together.

They soon reached the farm; Mrs. Cobb was upstairs in bed, so Mrs. Inglefield went up to see her,
and Diana and Inez climbed the gate and sat on the top rail of it, swinging their legs to and fro, and
talking eagerly together.

A pleasant-faced young woman, a niece of Mrs. Cobb's, presently came out of the house with two
glasses of milk and two slices of currant cake. The children thanked her, and left their gate and came
into the old porch and sat down there to enjoy what was given them. Diana was looking with the
greatest interest at a hen and her tiny chicks who were on the bit of grass lawn before the house.

"What darlings!" she said. "How I wish I could have some little chickens of my own! I've never seen
them in London."

"We have a lot," said Inez. "I'll bring you one or two if you like, unless the old hen makes a fuss and
tries to peck my eyes out."

Diana was delighted. "I'll make a little home for them in my doll's house," she said; "I brought it from
London, and the doors all open and shut, so they could run in and out."

They were very busy talking about it when Mrs. Inglefield appeared.

They walked across the fields, and then Mrs. Inglefield told Inez that she had better run home.

"I wonder," she said to her, "if you would like to please me by trying to be nice to Julia when you go
back. If you will try, I would like you to come to tea with my children on Monday."
Inez looked up:

"I won't promise," she said earnestly, "for it may be too difficult, but if I'm awfully wicked I won't come
to tea with you. That will make me try hard to be good."

Then she ran off. Her woes had been forgotten. She seemed a happy careless child.

"Oh, Mums, I do like her so much!" said Diana. "I've often wished we had another girl in our family.
'Specially now Chris has changed to me. And she loves hearing stories, she says she never gets
tired of it. And I'm going to tell her some of mine that I haven't written down. I do like people who
listen to them. I have to keep them bottled up so."

"Poor little storyteller!" said her mother, laughing. "I am afraid that busy brain of yours is only working
in one corner."

"How?" asked Diana.

"It's working in your imagination corner, and there are several other corners more important: the
learning corner—what grown-up people would call the receptive corner, and the spiritual corner. I
should like that last corner to spread and spread till it covered the centre of your brain. Do you ever
think about your Saviour and about heaven, that happy home prepared for those who love Him?"

Diana had hold of her mother's hand. She squeezed it tightly, but did not speak for a moment; then
she said:

"Noel has that corner spreading all over him, but nobody has talked to us as you do. Granny never
did."

"Well, darling, I'm going to talk very often about it, because I love to do so, and I want my children to
grow up with their little hands placed in the Hands of their loving Saviour; I want them to be led
through their lives by Him."

"I wonder if Chris and Noel have got home yet?"

Mrs. Inglefield smiled. She understood her children, and never gave them too much at a time. But
she prayed a lot for them, as all good mothers do.

When they reached home they found Chris dusty, hot, and rather cross. He was cleaning his bicycle
with some old rags outside the shed in which he kept it.

"Have you had a nice time?" his mother asked. "Where is Noel?"

"I don't know."

Chris spoke sullenly.

"Didn't he come back with you?"

"I think he's sulking in a ditch. I let him ride much more than I did, and then he went on for miles and
left me. He wouldn't stop. And when I did come up with him I let him have it, and he yelled, and I told
him, he shouldn't get on it again, so I came on home by myself."

"Oh, Chris! He's a little boy. You shouldn't have left him. Where is this ditch? I did think I could trust
you to take care of him."

Chris looked ashamed of himself, then he straightened himself and met his mother's eyes frankly:
"I'm sorry, Mums, but he is a little rotter. And he could have walked home quite well. It was at the four
cross corner by the Green Farm."

"That is nearly two miles away. I shall have to go and look for him."

Nurse had appeared, and protested as she heard her mistress say this.

"Indeed, you shall not, ma'am. You're much too tired. Master Chris must go himself."

"I can't," said Chris. "The little beast kicked and kicked at my bicycle with all his might, and
something is bent, it won't go properly. It began to go wrong just before I got home."

"You can walk as well as your mother," said Nurse sternly.

Mrs. Inglefield hesitated. She was feeling very tired. And Diana's quick eyes had seen it.

"Chris, I'll come with you a part of the way, anyhow," she said. "I'm not as tired as Mums, and I dare
say we shall meet him. And I want to tell you all about a strange little girl we met to-day."

"That's right," said Mrs. Inglefield. "I really think I must let you go. It is very silly of me, but I'm not a
good walker. I got out of the way of it in India. I hope you will meet him on the way."

So Chris and Diana set off, and Mrs. Inglefield sat down in a big chair in her tiny hall and gave a sigh.

"I wish my three children pulled together better, Nurse. Whose fault is it, do you think?"

"They'll get on all right after a bit, ma'am. It's early days yet. Master Noel has been accustomed to
have things all his own way, so it comes difficult to him. I think he wants a little taking down at times,
but Master Chris deserves to be tired, leaving him in the lurch like that."

"I shall not let them go out together again. It was an experiment."

It was a long time before the children came home.

Tea-time passed, and Mrs. Inglefield was getting seriously uneasy.

And then, about half-past six, they appeared. Mrs. Inglefield met them at the door with great relief of
mind.

Noel was in the middle of them, and looked tear-stained and defiant.

"We've had to drag him along," Diana said breathlessly. "He wasn't trying to come home, he was just
sitting there expecting you to fetch him, determined not to walk home at all by himself."

Noel flung himself in his mother's arms with a burst of sobs.

"My legs is nearly broken, I'm so tarred. Chris lost me and left me, and I didn't know the way home.
He's a beast!"

"Hush, hush! Now, no more tears. You are growing out of a baby. Go upstairs with Nurse, and you'll
feel better after tea."

Nurse took him off and managed to comfort him. Diana toiled upstairs with weary legs, and Chris
turned to his mother.

"I've made you angry," he said; "I'm sorry."

"Not angry, only disappointed. I thought I should be able to depend upon you."

"Oh, do, Mums, do! Forgive me. It's all my fault. I was furious with him for not playing fair. I forgot he
was only a baby. And he kicks so! When he kicks my shins, I feel I'd like to give him a good
thrashing!"

Chris looked at his mother so appealingly that she took him into her arms and kissed him.

"My eldest son," she said softly: "I want to feel that he is my right hand when his father is away!"

Chris gulped down a choke in his throat.

"Oh, I won't fail you next time," he said in a whisper; "give me a next time, won't you?"

"I hope you'll have a good many 'next times,'" said his mother, smiling. "Now off to your tea, my boy,
and make your peace with Noel."

She said no more about the matter till bedtime. They had not so much time with her as usual as their
tea was extra late, but when Noel was in bed she talked to him very gravely.

He was still very angry with Chris, and began making excuses for himself, but his mother stopped
him:

"I generally find that the angry person is the one in the wrong," she said. "Now, Noel, listen, hold your
breath and hush! What does God think of you, I wonder! He was there, He saw it all, He heard all
you said and saw all you did. You were the first in the wrong, you had no right to go off with Chris's
bicycle and refuse to give it up. It belongs to him, not to you. And it was very good of him to let you
ride it at all. I must now forbid you to use it again till you have my permission. You can't be trusted
with it. You made Chris angry this afternoon, you vexed and worried me by not coming home, and
you grieved God. You are His little servant, but this afternoon you changed sides and have been
serving the Devil. What are you doing now? You can't go to sleep till you have asked God to forgive
you."

Noel lay very still, his angry eyes closed, and he looked like a little angel.

Mrs. Inglefield had one of his hot little hands in hers, and she felt it twitching. She was silent now,
and for a few minutes only the rather loud ticking of the nursery clock broke the stillness in the room.

Then Noel opened his eyes and looked at her.

"I'm quite, quite good now," he said calmly; "he's left me very kickly, because God and I turned him
out."

"I am glad to hear it, darling. Now, will you tell God that you are sorry?"

"I've told Him. And I fink it's all right. I fink He's forgiven me."

"I'd like you to tell Chris you're sorry, too. If I bring Chris here, will you do so?"

"Oh, but I aren't, not a bit!"

"Noel!"

Noel closed his eyes tightly again.

"I'm afraid," he murmured, "Satan's still inside me; he's left a bit of himself behind."
Mrs. Inglefield got up.

She knew that Noel rather liked to prolong this kind of conversation.

"I am going to fetch Chris," she said; "if you're really sorry—and God will not forgive you unless you
are—you will of course, own up to him that it was your fault in the beginning—you know that is true."

She left the room. Noel wriggled about a good deal in bed, and when Chris came in there was
nothing visible of him: only a fat lump below the bedclothes.

"Here is Chris," said Mrs. Inglefield; "I will leave you together."

She left the room.

Chris stood by the bed waiting.

Presently a muffled voice was heard.

"I'm sorry!"

"So am I!" said Chris frankly; "I hate making Mums unhappy!"

Noel's curly head suddenly shot up:

"Mums is always happy. It's only wicked people who are mis'able."

"Wicked people make her miserable," said Chris; "at least, we do."

"Did I spoil your cycle?"

"No, not much. I think I can put it right."

"I'm never to touch it again, never! Mums said so. Isn't that a punishment?"

"It was my fault," acknowledged Chris meekly; "I aggravated you."

Noel nodded. "And so I did, too. I've finished telling everybody I'm sorry, and now I'm going to sleep."

Chris looked at him.

"We'll shake hands on it," he said. "That's what we do at school when we've had a fight."

So Noel's fat dimpled hand and Chris's were clasped together, and then Chris crept silently out of the
room. His mother was standing by a passage window looking out into the dusky garden. A young
moon was rising over a hill in the distance. Her thoughts were away in India with her husband. She
was longing, as she so often did, to have him once more by her side.

Chris leant his head against her shoulder.

"We're all right, Mother. I'm so sorry we've made you sad."

She put her arm round him and said gently:

"I've been wondering what kind of boys your father will meet when he comes home. Whether he'll be
disappointed in them, and tell me that I have failed to train them rightly: that I have spoilt them. I wish
he were here to talk to you, Chris."
"Oh, Mums, we want no one but you," was Chris's fervent reply; "and I'm awfully sorry about this
afternoon. It was all my fault. I was cross to him first, and then he did it to spite me, and I left him
there and rode off, to spite him! But we've made it up, and it won't happen again, I promise you!"

Then his mother turned quickly and kissed the brown head on her shoulder.

"I want to depend on you; I want to know that Noel won't come to harm when he's with you, and I'm
going to trust you again, Chris. I don't believe you'll fail me."

Mrs. Inglefield had no fault to find with Chris for a long time after that. His ambition was to have his
mother's trust and confidence.

CHAPTER VII
Inez at Home

On Monday afternoon Inez appeared just before three o'clock. Miss Morgan was just taking Diana
and Noel out for their daily walk, but Mrs. Inglefield said that as Inez had come so early, they could
all play in the garden together, instead of walking out, so Miss Morgan went home and the children
were left to themselves.

Of course the garden was shown to Inez: she was tremendously interested in it all.

"It's so lovely to be able to grow just what you like," she said; "I think I shall get our gardener to give
me a bit of ground, but not for flowers. I shall grow pumpkins and pomegranates."

"Oh!" said Diana, awed by this magnificent idea, "Will you be able to do it?"

Inez nodded; then she pointed to Noel's ground.

"I like the idea of growing your own Christmas tree," she said. "I think you were a clever boy to think
of it."

Noel was very pleased.

"He's my little friend," he said; "I talk to him a lot. It's very dull for him now, but he knows his grand
time is coming. And he's growing like anyfing. Look at his dear little green tips."

When they had seen all over the garden, they climbed Up into the medlar tree, and Diana began
telling one of her wonderful stories. She found Inez a better listener than Noel. He presently left
them, but the story continued, and was left to be continued.

"I can't make up any more now," said Diana; "I'll tell you the rest when we see each other next!"

Then they got down from the tree and played hide-and seek, and after a time Diana was called
indoors by Nurse. Some new shoes had arrived which had to be tried on. Noel and Inez stayed in the
garden.
"Would you like to see some flowers I planted for God?" Noel asked, wishing to do his part in
entertaining the guest.

Inez looked at him and laughed, then followed him into the churchyard, where he showed her with
pride some sweet-peas and blue cornflowers coming up by the church porch. Then he showed her
some forget-me-nots growing on a small grave, and on another, some little pink asters.

"I did those," he said with pride, "but Mr. Wargrave stopped me. I do fink God might have a better
garden, don't you? Mr. Wargrave says people are God's flowers. They're all sleeping underground
now, but they'll come up the most lovely people by and by. At least, I s'pose it's their bodies that will.
They get out of them when they die, and go away to God."

"You are a funny boy!" said Inez, staring at him. "Nobody in our house talks about God. Go on, say
some more."

"Well, you know," said Noel eagerly, "I'm a Chris'mas child, specially born on the same day as Jesus
Christ. Chris and Diana don't understand, so God loves me and I love Him, and I want Him to have
lovely flowers in His garden, because He likes them. He made them, you know, so of course He
does."

"I s'pose," said Inez, "He made me, but God doesn't like me. I'm too wicked."

"Are you?" said Noel, looking at her curiously. "What kind of wickedness do you do?"

"Well, yesterday I got the garden hose and I turned it on into Julia's bedroom window. It's rather low
down, and she was doing her hair and trying on ear-rings, waiting for the gardener to come along
and talk to her. She was in such a rage; her face was streaming with water, and then I had to hide
from her till she forgot it a bit, and I hid in the best spare-room bed, and then they made a fuss about
that."

"I think that's rather fun," said Noel, his eyes sparkling. "I wonder if we have got a hose. It squirts
water, doesn't it? We used to have one in India. I should like to squirt my Chris'mas tree. He'd like it,
I'm sure."

"I like to squirt people who don't like it," said Inez; "that's wicked, they say. But I don't think I care
about God. I hate saying my prayers. I never know what it means, and it's so dull. And church is
awfully dull."

"Oh!" gasped Noel; "I think it's beautiful! It belongs to God. He comes there, you know, every
Sunday, and in the week besides. I almost fink I see Him sometimes. Mums says that God likes
everybody, and calls them to get near Him. He doesn't like them far away."

"But God lives millions and billions of miles away up at the back of the stars," said Inez in a
thoughtful tone.

"Oh, but He doesn't stay there," said Noel, shaking his head gravely. "Oh dear, no! He's always close
to us. Why, I really do believe He's listening to us now."

There was such an emphatic conviction in Noel's tone that Inez looked quickly round; then she
laughed uneasily.

"I hope He didn't hear me say I didn't like church," she said, "and I didn't like Him. But that's how I'm
wicked, they all say so. I care for nobody and nobody cares for me. And now let's jump over those
flower-beds: we've been grave enough."
They were back in the garden by this time, and of course in jumping the flower-beds Inez missed the
distance and landed herself in the middle of one, breaking a young azalea to pieces and making
havoc of some small seedlings planted.

"There now, that's a wickedness!" said Inez ruefully, as she surveyed the disaster. "Now, what will
your mother say to me? Shall I tell her that a wild dog came in from the road and did it, or some
pigs? Do you keep pigs?"

"We've got to tell her truefully if we do fings," said Noel.

Then Diana appeared, saying that tea was ready. She was consulted about the damaged flower-bed.

"Here is Mums coming out," she said. "She won't be angry."

And Mrs. Inglefield was not. She smiled at Inez, called her a little tomboy, and asked her not to do it
again. Then they went upstairs to the nursery to tea.

There were hot buttered scones, plum cake, honey, and some fancy biscuits. Inez enjoyed her tea
thoroughly.

"I hope you'll come to tea with me very soon," she said; "but I'm afraid they won't give us so good a
tea as this. I should like you to come the end of this week: will you? We've a lovely big house to play
hide-and-seek in!"

"May Chris come, too?" asked Diana. "He'll be home on Saturday from school. If you asked us then,
he'd be able to come. Will Julia like us coming?"

"I shan't tell her till the day arrives," said Inez, "and then there'll be no time for her to do anything.
She didn't mind my coming here to-day. She's glad to get rid of me."

"And I'll have time before Saturday to make up a lot more about 'Ada and Gertie,'" said Diana.

"Ada and Gertie" were the two motherless heroines in Diana's story.

They chattered away all tea-time, and afterwards went down to the drawing-room and had games
with Mrs. Inglefield.

Inez was very loath to go home. To her surprise, at seven o'clock Julia appeared. She was a very
smart young woman with a sharp voice, but she was quite respectful to Mrs. Inglefield.

"I've come to fetch Miss Inez," she announced, and then, whilst Inez was putting on her outdoor
shoes, she went into the nursery and had a chat with Nurse.

Nurse spoke to Mrs. Inglefield afterwards.

"I hope the little girl won't be making our children naughty, ma'am. That young woman says she is
terribly wild, and she can do nothing with her. She ran out of the house in her nightdress one night,
and she has fits of passion in which she threatens to kill anyone who comes near her, and herself in
the bargain. 'Tis a pity she has no governess, or isn't sent to school. She's supposed to do lessons
with that young person, but she seems to have no influence over her, and the child will learn
nothing."

"I think there are faults on both sides," said Mrs. Inglefield. "Mr. Wargrave has been telling me about
the child. Her parents don't care for her. They wanted a boy because of the property; and it goes to a
distant cousin, for a girl can't inherit. Poor little Inez has never had any love in her life. I feel a great
pity for her, and I think we must try and help her."
It had been arranged before Inez left that the children should come over to spend the following
Saturday afternoon with her. Mrs. Inglefield had asked Julia if it would be convenient to her, and she
had made no objection.

When Chris heard about it, he looked doubtful.

"I don't know that I care about going to tea with a girl," he said.

His mother smiled.

"It won't hurt you, my boy. Inez has a most beautiful home, and you will enjoy seeing it. I used to go
to the Park, as it is called, when I was a little girl, and I loved it. I am afraid there are no deer now in
the Park, as there used to be, but the gardens are delightful, and perhaps she will take you up to
what we used to call the battlements. It is a walk round the roof with a wall outside and places where
the cannons used to be fired. It is like an old castle."

This sounded interesting, and when Saturday came, Chris accompanied Diana and Noel without a
murmur.

They had to walk a good mile before they came to it.

Chris felt he was in charge of the party, and squared his shoulders as he marched along the road.

"Don't you think Inez is a pretty name?" Diana asked him. "Mother says she is Spanish—at least, her
mother is. I can't think why she isn't happy living in a big beautiful house; but she told me that all the
rooms were shut up, and that she has only one small room to live in. And she has all her meals
alone. Julia likes to have hers with the other servants. It must be very dull for her."

"I wish she had a brother," said Chris; "I wonder if she could play cricket? We might try a game."

Talking together the mile soon came to an end. They turned in at some big iron gates, and up a drive
bordered by chestnut trees, which were in full blossom.

Diana insisted upon stopping to gaze up at them. She always had a keen eye for beauty.

"They're wonderful," she said. "It's like going up an avenue to an enchanted castle. Let's pretend
Inez is a princess kept in close custody."

"Oh, but how wet and sticky!" said Noel. "I shouldn't like to be kept in custard!"

Diana and Chris shouted with laughter. Noel did not like to be laughed at, and he turned a little sulky;
but when they came up to the house he was himself again.

It was an old grey stone, turreted building. Two gardeners were mowing a very big lawn in front of it,
and there were beds of spring flowers in front of the big square stone porch. They had to go up a
flight of steps to the door, but before they had got to the top Inez had appeared.

"I saw you from the window," she said, a little breathlessly, "and I slid down the banisters the whole
way."

Then she looked at Chris.

"Are you older or younger than Diana?" she asked.

"I'm the eldest of the family," Chris replied, drawing up his head proudly.
"So am I," said Inez, dancing lightly up and down on the tips of her toes. "I'm the eldest, and I'm the
youngest, too, for there's nobody older or younger than me. I'm the only one."

Chris looked at her with some interest.

"Come along upstairs, and I'll show you where I live, and then we'll have a jolly racket all over the
house and garden!"

She pulled hold of Diana's hand; the children followed her through a very large and lofty hall, up a
broad staircase, and then along some stone passages through low doorways, until she pushed open
the door of a room.

It was not a very cheerful-looking room. There were two windows, but they were small, set in thick
grey stone. The carpet was a dingy brown. There was a round table with a red cloth, a horsehair
sofa, a glass bookcase with a cupboard underneath it, a few very gloomy-looking pictures. Four
chairs stood against the wall.

"You're very tidy," Diana observed as she looked round. "Where do you keep your playthings? You
should see our nursery! It's littered all over the floor."

"I haven't got any playthings," said Inez; "I don't care for that sort of thing, and Julia keeps this room
tidy. I'm never in it, and if she locks me in I just climb out of the window and walk along the gutter till I
get to the battlements. I like playing in the stables and lofts. I have some rabbits I'll show you. I only
come up here for meals."

"There's not much to do here," said Diana.

"No, and tea will come very soon. Take off your gloves and things, and come on down to the garden."

This they did, and all agreed that the gardens and shrubberies and stables were the best places to
be in.

They had not seen half of them before a tea bell rang, and they had to return to the house. Julia had
provided quite a nice tea: bread-and-butter, scones with jam, currant buns, and a big seed cake. She
poured out tea for them, and then left them. Inez, with some importance, took her place, and poured
out more cups of tea when wanted. Her tongue was very busy, and her little guests listened to her
accounts of herself with surprise and awe. There seemed nothing that she could not and would not
do.

She rode the cows as well as the horses bare-back, she drove the carts backwards and forwards to
the Farm, she had a rope ladder which she fixed to all kinds of dangerous places, and she could
climb up and down it like a monkey. Chris's eyes sparkled as he listened: this girl was more like a
boy than anything else, he thought, and he began to long to join her in some of her mischievous
pranks. When tea was over she suggested they should go to the battlements, and she took them
through a narrow door, up a winding stone staircase, till they came out above the house. Here they
had the greatest fun, running round the turreted towers and looking through the peepholes down to
the country stretching out below them.

"You—you know what I'm going to do when I grow up?" Inez said. "I shall have a flying machine of
my own, and fly all over the world."

"You couldn't do it," said Chris. "You'd come a cropper. It wants a proper airman to-fly."

"I'd be a proper airwoman," said Inez obstinately. "Now we'll come down and have some shooting. I
have some bows and arrows. I've just one friend, Dick Yorke: he's the boy at the west lodge, and he
makes stunning bows and arrows. He and I have shooting matches."
She led them on to the old lawn, left them there whilst she raced off to a shed, and came back in a
few minutes with half a dozen bows in one hand and a bundle of arrows in the other.

This sport proved very exciting. Chris enjoyed it as much as anyone. They aimed at big paper targets
fixed on some tree-trunks at the bottom of the lawn, and Chris and Inez both reached the bull's-eye.

There was no lack of occupation that evening. They went all over the stables, saw the two white
terriers, the rabbits, chickens and turkeys, pigs and goats. They visited the barns, and enjoyed the
swing that Inez had got one of the men to put up for her, and then, to their dismay, the big clock in
the stable-yard struck seven.

Mrs. Inglefield had told them that they must leave Inez at seven o'clock.

When Chris said they must go, Inez declared that they should not.

"Why, I don't go to bed till eight, and very often I run out and hide somewhere away from Julia, and
don't come in till nearly nine. I haven't shown you half yet. I want to take you down to the pond where
the fish are."

"We must go now," Chris said firmly. "I promised Mother we should be punctual."

"I don't think you're to be pitied at all, with all this," said Diana, waving her hands about. "I think you
live in a lovely house, Inez; I should never, never be dull, and I should write stories about people
being shut up in your castle, and soldiers outside trying to catch them."

"It's so dull being alone," said Inez with a pout. "I have nobody with me."

"You have two peoples always," said Noel, staring at her with big eyes.

"I've nobody I like."

"Don't you like God?"

"Oh, shut up, Noel!" said Chris. "And come on. We must not be late."

"Oh, what a good boy am I!" said Inez mockingly. "But I shan't let you go, so don't you think it. You
can easily say you didn't know the time."

"But we do know the time, and we don't tell lies."

"I do whenever I want to. What does it matter?"

They were walking towards the house as they spoke, and Diana ran upstairs to get their gloves and
scarves that they had taken off before tea.

When she had got them and was coming downstairs again, she heard a great noise in the hall.

It was Inez struggling and fighting with Julia.

She had inveigled Chris and Noel into the big library, and then had run out and turned the key of the
door.

"Now I've got you!" she cried, dancing up and down. "And you'll have to be late going home, for I
shan't let you go."

Chris and Noel battered at the door, and Julia appeared. Then ensued a struggle for the key. Inez
fought and screamed and kicked, and even tried to bite, when Julia wrenched the key out of her
grasp and unlocked the door. Diana looked on in horror. Inez seemed to have turned into a little tiger.

"Come on," she said to the boys, "let us get out of this." And then they hastily went out of the hall
door.

Inez left Julia and darted after them.

"You are all milksops, and I don't care for one of you! You might have backed me up against that
beast of a Julia!"

"I wouldn't fight women," said Chris scornfully.

"And now I suppose you'll go home and tell your mother how wicked I am, and she'll never let me
come near you again!"

The children were silent for a moment, then Diana said steadily:

"We tell Mother everything, but she won't be angry, only sorry."

"And now I know who does always live in your house," said Noel in his eager, breathless way: "it's
the Devil!"

This statement reduced Inez to silence.

Chris hurried his sister and brother down the drive, and Inez stopped still and gazed after them with
tears in her eyes.

"Good-bye," Chris said, looking back and waving his cap, "and thank you for a very nice time."

Inez made no answer: she turned and walked back slowly to the house. Noel's strange words rang in
her ears: "Julia says I'm a young devil," she said to herself slowly. "I wonder if it is the Devil that
makes me get into such tempers. I don't like to think he lives in the house with me."

Meanwhile Chris was saying to Noel:

"I do wish you wouldn't talk so much about God and the Devil. People don't do it. It makes us quite
ashamed of you."

"I don't care," said Noel, setting his lips in an obstinate line. "It was Satan that made her fight like
that. I'll ask Mother if it wasn't!"

"She's awfully naughty," said Diana, "but I do like her. She thinks we're prigs, but we couldn't be
expected to all begin to fight and kick and scream at poor Julia. I don't wonder she gets cross with
Inez!"

"She ought to go to school," said Chris in his superior tone. "She'd soon get licked into shape."

"She told me when her father and mother come home they are going to send her to school, and she
says she will like it."

"Oh, will she!" said Chris with a short laugh. "A boy came the other day to our school: his mother and
nurse have spoilt him, and he began carrying on high jinks with some fellows. You should have seen
how they dropped on him! I felt quite sorry for the kid!"

"What did they do to him?" asked Noel with interest.

"You'll see when you come there. You aren't much better than Inez sometimes, when you can't get
your way, so don't preach so much."

"I don't preach. But I shall when I grow up. It's very good to preach."

Chris refused to argue the matter out.

When they reached home they found their mother waiting for them. She was soon taken into their
confidence, but as Diana said, she did not feel angry with Inez, only very, very sorry for her.

"I'm not afraid of her doing you harm, for I hope you will do her good."

"But we don't like being prigs," said Chris.

"No. You need not be. Be your own happy bright little selves, and show her that you are happier
doing right than when you are doing wrong. That is all."

The children said no more. Diana had been rather afraid that their acquaintance with Inez might be
stopped, and she was looking forward to pouring out some of the imaginations in her brain to her.
Now she felt quite happy.

"Mother always understands," she said to herself as she laid her head down on her pillow that night,
"and if Inez had a mother like ours, I expect she'd be as good as gold!"

CHAPTER VIII
The Little Rescuers

"Come on, you little duffer! You're only picking rubbish. We want to get to the wild strawberries!"

"I'm tarred, and moss isn't rubbish! I fink I shall put it round my Chris'mas tree."

Chris, Diana and Noel were taking a walk together. It was the following Saturday, and Mrs. Inglefield,
who encouraged independence in Chris, assented gladly when he told her that the baker had told
him of a field which contained wild strawberries and that they would all like to go and get them. Chris
had never seen a wild strawberry in his life, but he imagined them to be pretty much like those he
had seen in the London shops. It was rather a long walk for Noel, and he soon began to lag behind
and stop to look in the hedges for spoils. Chris felt impatient; it was a hot afternoon in June, and the
country lane was dusty and breathless. No friendly trees shaded them from the glaring sun. Diana
trudged along with a smiling face. She was generally wrapt in dreams when she was out of doors,
but Noel's plaintive voice roused her.

"Take my hand," she said; "I'll help you along. It isn't much farther now. It's that high field over there
by the side of the wood, isn't it, Chris?"

"Yes, that's it. We can sit down when we get there and eat."

"But we must bring some back for Mother."

"I'm raining!" announced Noel; "raining quite fast like I did in India!"

Diana laughed.

"You do say such things!" she said. "Take your handkerchief out and wipe your face. We're all hot."

The lane along which they were walking was very narrow and winding. It was a by-lane, and by the
grassy ruts in it showed that it was not much used.

As they rounded a corner they suddenly came upon a motor turned nearly upside down in a hedge,
and by the side of it a lady sat reclining against a bank. She did not see them till they were right up to
her, for her eyes were shut, and she was groaning in an unhappy sort of way.

The children stood still, and then, doffing his cap, Chris stepped up to her.

"Are you hurt, please? Can we help you?"

The lady started and looked up. Then she put her hand up to her head and pulled her hat straight.
She had a very cheerful-looking face and seemed about the age of their mother.

"Thank goodness someone has come by at last! I thought in this benighted country that no one
would come to my help! Of course you can help me, little boy, by fetching men from somewhere to
right my car and put it into the middle of the road again. If I hadn't smashed or sprained my ankle, I
could have walked back to the village and sent someone to bring it along."

"I'll go at once," Chris said cheerfully. "There must be some policemen about, and they'll see to
everything."

The lady went into peals of laughter.

"Hark at him! A little Londoner, eh? The police may rescue people in distress in London, but they
don't exist in the country, my boy. There's a single one here and there, but my experience is that
never by any chance do they turn up when one wants them. You must think of someone better than a
policeman. Get to the nearest farm. They'll send some men along."

"There's that farm we passed a little time ago," said Diana. "Run back there, Chris, and ask them to
come."

"Of course they may be out in the fields working," said the lady; "but get someone—anyone—quickly,
if you can! I seem to have been here hours, and have shouted myself hoarse."

Noel stepped up in front of her when Chris had run off. His eyes were big with thought and anxiety.

"The best person who can help in a naxident is God," he remarked, looking at her gravely; "I fink
He's the Person to be asked to send the men you want. For He knows just where they are."

Then the lady threw back her head and laughed more heartily than she had done before.

"Oh, you delicious child!" she said. "I'm sure from your face and curls you must be a cherub just
flown down from heaven. Now, aren't you? Confess you are."

"I don't know what a cherub is," said Noel, looking at her stolidly, "but I haven't been in heaven since
I was a baby."

"Please excuse him," interrupted Diana. "He's always talking like that. We can't get him to be quiet
about God."
She said the last word in a whisper.

"But," said the lady, "I shouldn't wonder if he were right. Could you ask God to help us, as you seem
to know Him better than the rest of us?"

She turned to Noel as she spoke, and in a moment he was on his knees in the dusty lane.

"Please, God, send somebody very quickly to help this poor lady. For Jesus' sake. Amen."

Then he got up.

"That's all right," he said calmly. "God always hears when anyone wants help. Mums has told us so."

He looked a little defiantly at Diana as he spoke, for he knew she was thoroughly disapproving of
him.

But Diana did not heed him. She had seen the lady make a wry face and clasp her foot with her
hand.

"Can I bind my handkerchief round it?" she asked. "Or get some water to bathe it with?"

"You are a little dear to think of such a thing, but I can't get my shoe off, it hurts too much; and I was
due to lunch with Lady Alice at two o'clock. It's past three now. What will she think? Do you know
where her house is? I took a wrong turn, thinking I would make a short cut, and then ran myself into
the hedge in this twisty, twirly lane! It's only the third time I've been out alone with my car. I suppose I
was careless."

"I know where Lady Alice lives. Mums has been to tea with her and has shown us the house. It's over
there. We can just see its chimneys."

"Well, now, that's splendid! May I send you off there to tell them where I am? They'll send their car for
me. And leave the cherub to take care of me."

"I think I can go across the fields," said Diana, peeping over the hedge.

This was an adventure after her own heart. She found a gate into the field and sped away.

Noel heaved a sigh, then suddenly plumped down on the bank beside the stranger.

"I'm so tarred," he said; "we've walked miles. We were going to pick strawberries."

"Were you? How delightful! I hope the strawberries will wait for you. Talk away. Tell me who you are
and all about yourself. It will cheer me up."

Noel began at once.

"I've comed from India. The other children haven't been there since they were babies. Mums likes us
all alike, but I know her bester than the others, 'cause I've always, always been with her. And I've got
a Chris'mas tree. I planted it myself. I'm very fond of him, and I talk to him a lot. He's rather sad now
because the flowers are so pretty and he isn't pretty, and he doesn't smell like the roses. But by and
by, when Chris'mas comes, he'll be beautiful, grand, and beautiful! And the flowers will be dead and
buried. He's really much better than they are, because he lives longer. Chris and Dinah won't laugh
at him when he's dressed with beautiful lights and presents, and when he's in the middle of the room
and all of us dancing round him. I tell him about it when he feels a little unhappy. And he nods his
head and unnerstands."

"I'm most awfully interested," said the lady as Noel came to a pause. "Go on. Tell me more."
Noel drew a long breath, and then he sprang to his feet. "Here's a man in a cart, and I believe it is
God's man, and he's got here first of all."

Sure enough, a farm cart was coming round the corner, and the man who was driving got down at
once when he saw there had been an accident.

"You'm best get in my cart, mum, and I'll drive 'ee to the Hall," he said when matters had been
explained to him. "'Tisn't a one man's job to get that car out o' ditch."

The lady looked at the rough dirty cart which had been used for carting manure, and she smiled very
sweetly:

"I think I'll wait, thank you. I've sent a little messenger to the Hall, and they'll be sending a car for
me."

The man rubbed the back of his head and looked first at her and then at the car.

"Seems as if I be no use to ye."

"But you must be," Noel said, staring at him, "because God sent you. I asked Him to. Oh, do give a
pull to the car and I'll help you."

The man laughed at the tiny boy's offer. The car was a very small one, but he set his shoulder to it,
and after much vigorous effort he actually got it righted.

Noel clapped his hands in triumph, and danced round him excitedly:

"I knew you'd do it!"

The lady was very pleased. She presented the man with two half-crowns out of her purse, and then
she tried to raise herself to her feet.

"If I could once get in!" she sighed. "But I'm afraid it is of no use. I shouldn't be able to manage the
car with no feet, and it is my right one that is hurt. I am not a clever enough driver to do without it."

"Here's Chris coming with some other men," shouted Noel, "but we've done it without them!"

"I think I shall be very glad of their help to bring my car along after me," said the lady, who seemed
willing to employ all who came up.

Chris seemed almost disappointed when he saw the car standing on its four wheels in the lane.

"I've brought Mr. Down and Mr. Gates," he said importantly. "They were working in the field and they
came at once."

"But God's man got here first," said Noel.

For a moment there was silence; the men stared at each other, and then the lady had a brilliant idea.

"Take one of the cushions out of the car, or perhaps the thick rug would answer as well, two of you
catch hold of each end, and I can then be carried off to the Hall, where they are expecting me to
lunch."

This was immediately done. She waved her hand to the little boys from her improvised seat.

"Good-bye; you will have to come and see me. I have taken a house for the summer about four miles
off, and I am ever so grateful for your help."
She seemed to have forgotten about Diana, and Chris asked Noel where she was.

"She's gone to Lady Alice's. I don't believe she'll ever come back; let's go on and get the
strawberries."

After a little hesitation, Chris agreed to this.

"I like that lady," Noel announced as they went on their way. "She laughs so when she talks. And she
liked me to talk to her. I told her all about my Chris'mas tree, and she said it was very interessing!"

"I bet she did!" Chris said with an unbelieving laugh.

Here Noel made a rush forwards. They had reached the top of the field, and there was some red
amongst the grass along a bank there.

But when Chris reached the spot he was bitterly disappointed.

"They're so tiny, they're not proper strawberries!"

"They taste nice and sweet," said Noel, putting some of the little strawberries into his mouth. "Let's
pick a lot of them."

They set to work. There were really a fine number on the bank, and Chris began to wish Diana was
with them.

"She's so quick," he said. "She'd pick a lot in no time."

But Diana did not come. There was no sign of her. And by the time they had nearly filled their basket,
Chris said they must go home.

On their way back, they passed the place where the accident had happened.

The car was gone, but Noel's quick eyes spied something in the hedge. He pounced upon it at once.
It proved to be a small leather purse attached to a little gold chain.

"What shall we do with it, Chris?"

"Take it to her," cried Chris, joyfully pouncing upon it and putting it in his pocket. "Come on, Noel,
hurry up! The Hall is ever so far off, but it will be fun going there. I shouldn't wonder if they haven't
kept Dinah to tea."

"I found it," said Noel sulkily. "It's mine, it isn't yours."

"What does it matter who found it, you stupid! Why, you're beginning to cry! What a baby! I'll give it to
you to give to her when we get there. Come on! What a slow coach you are!"

Noel struggled to keep up with his brother's quick pace, but at last he gave up, and again dissolved
into tears.

"I'm tarred. I've walked ever so many miles. I wiss I was home!"

"Then you go home, and I'll go on to the Hall."

"It isn't fair. I found it, and I like that lady. She smiled at me!"

Poor Noel was divided between his longing to go on and the desire to rest his poor little legs. The
afternoon had been very warm, and he was tired out. By the time they came to the signpost at the
cross-roads which marked the way to the Hall, he had made up his mind to go home.

"We might take it to her to-morrow," he suggested.

"Oh, she must have it at once!" Chris said. "It has money in it. I can hear it jingle. You always give up
money at once. Besides, she may be wanting to use it. You go on back to Mums and give her the
strawberries, and tell her all about it."

Noel brightened up. To give his mother anything was always a treat, and he dearly liked telling her of
any adventure that befell him.

So the little boys parted, and Noel reached home at last. His mother met him at the door.

"Why, my darling, how warm you are!"

"And I'm tarred and firsty," said Noel, "and I'm raining all over me—"

"Where are the others? Come into the dining-room and I will get you a glass of lemonade."

"Here are the strawberries, such tinies! But they taste very nice, Mums. Dinah and Chris have both
gone off about a lady who's at Lady Alice's—"

Then he poured into his mother's ears the events of the afternoon. When he had drunk the lemonade
and had had his hands and face washed, and was seated in his mother's lap in her boudoir, he
began to feel better.

And then he suddenly put his arms round his mother's neck and hugged her.

"I do feel sorry for the poor little boys who can't get on their mothers' laps," he said.

"Ah!" said his mother with a sigh and a smile. "I'm afraid my children will soon get beyond their
mother's lap."

"I never shall," said Noel determinedly. "Not when I'm a grown-up big man—"

"You're my baby-man now," said Mrs. Inglefield, laughing. "And I should like to keep you so."

It was not very long afterwards that Chris and Diana came home together. Diana had her story to tell
first.

"I thought I should never get to Lady Alice's, it seemed such a long way, and when I knocked at the
big door I felt quite frightened. I told the butler about the accident, and he took me into such a
beautiful big drawing-room, and there were a lot of people there, and Lady Alice came up and kissed
me, for she said she knew who I was, and then she ordered out her car at once, but the chauffeur
couldn't be found, he had gone home to dinner, and so it all took time, and Lady Alice gave me a real
ice and some cake, and then said I had better go in the car, and she sent her maid as well, and we
were coming through the village and had got to the narrow lane when we met two men carrying the
lady on a cushion, and so she was put very carefully in, and it hurt her and she gave a little scream,
and then she said I must come back with her and tell her all about ourselves, for she wanted to be
amused."

"But she wouldn't go to Lady Alice's; she said she must get straight home because of her foot. And
she lives in such a pretty little house, Mums, and she has a dear old aunt who lives with her and is
very small, not much taller than I am, but so pretty, and she made such a fuss when she heard about
her foot. And she's called Constance—the old lady called her Connie, and then one of the servants
was sent for a doctor, and old Miss Trent, that's the aunt's name, began to bathe the foot and
bandage it, and she let me help, and Miss Constance laughed most of the time, though she called
out too, and she said such funny things; she made up a rhyme about herself, about taking out her
car, and roaming afar, and having a spill, and then being ill, and it ended up with:"

"'Having contracted a sprain,

I won't drive again;
I'll lie on my sofa
And become a poor loafer.'"

"And then she said she must have visitors to amuse her, and she wants Noel to go to her on
Monday."

Diana paused for breath. Noel clapped his hands, and cried out with delight.

"Well now, I'll tell the rest," said Chris. "I went off to the Hall, but when I got to the lodge the woman
told me that Lady Alice had sent her car to take the lady home, and I asked where it was, and the
woman told me it was called Ladywell Cottage, and was two miles off. I was pretty well done, but as
it happened a baker's cart was going that way, and he took me up. It was fun driving along with him! I
think bakers' men must have a jolly time of it! And then I went up and knocked at the door, and the
doctor had just arrived, but the lady would see me and thanked me for the purse, and I told her that
Noel had picked it up, but couldn't walk so far, so that's why she wants to see him next Monday. And
then the doctor said he would drive Dinah and me back, for he was going to see Ted at the Rectory
and it was all in his way. So we had a jolly drive back in the doctor's car, and here we are!"

"I think you've had a lot of adventures," said his mother, smiling, "but I am sorry for that poor girl's
accident. I met her at the Hall the other day. She has come into this part to spend the summer here.
Her name is Constance Trent. She lives with her brother, who is a Harley Street doctor, and is a
cousin of Lady Alice's. I don't know how Noel will get to her, it is three miles from here."

"She said if her car was all right, she would send it for him. I wish she had asked us all," said Diana.
"I liked her, she's such fun!"

Then the nursery bell rang for tea, and Mrs. Inglefield took the strawberries and put them upon a big
plate and covered them with white sugar, and said she must have nursery tea with them so that she
could enjoy the strawberries as well as they.

Nurse produced some cream, and the children thought they had never tasted any fruit more
delicious.

"It was worth getting hot and tired for," said Diana, "especially as it helped us to rescue a lady in
distress. I shall write my next story about it, only I shall make her a princess in disguise."

CHAPTER IX
The Coming of the Holidays