1There was in Amsterdam a doctor named Adriaan Koerbagh. He was of an age with the grinder of glass, and he had sat with him behind the closed shutter and read the pages. But he was a different kind of man. The grinder was a banked fire. Adriaan was a torch.
2He had studied medicine and then the law, and he had come out of both with one settled anger. It was this: that the learned kept their learning in Latin, as a miser keeps coin in a chest, and the common people were left to be frightened by words they could not read.
3A fishwife was told she was damned in a tongue she did not know. A carter was sued in a tongue he did not know. A sick man was handed a paper by his doctor with his own death written on it in a tongue he did not know. Adriaan said that a people kept in such a fog could be led anywhere by anyone, and that the fog was kept on purpose.
4So he did a thing that seems small now. He wrote a book in Dutch. It was a kind of word-book. It took the hard words of the lawyers, the doctors and the preachers, one by one, and said in the speech of the market what each one meant. He called it a garden of flowers.
5But when he came to the preachers' words he did not stop at the meaning. He said what he thought of the thing. He wrote that the holy books were written by men, and must be read as other books are read. He wrote that there are no devils, and that tales of witchcraft are tales. He wrote that God and the being of all things are not two.
6The grinder of glass had told his friends: copy by hand, show no one you have not tried, take care. Adriaan printed it, in the common tongue, for any carter with a few pence to buy.
7The preachers of Amsterdam went to the magistrates within the month. Adriaan did not wait to be fetched. He slipped out of the city to a little free town called Culemborg, where the writ of Amsterdam did not run, and there, being Adriaan, he sat down and wrote a second book that was bolder than the first.
8He sent it to a printer in Utrecht. The printer set the first sheets in type, and read what he was setting, and grew afraid. He stopped his press. Then he carried the sheets to the sheriff.
9Now they wanted him in earnest. They took his brother Johannes first, a gentle man who was to have been a preacher, and held him in the cells to see what he would say. And they put a price on Adriaan: fifteen hundred guilders to whoever would tell where he lay.
10He had gone to Leiden by then. He had cut his hair and put on a dark wig and taken a room under another name, in a street of weavers. He lived there for some weeks on bread and beer, writing still. But fifteen hundred guilders was more than a weaver saw in five years. Someone who knew his face came and looked at the wig a little too long, and went away, and came back with the watch.
11They brought him to Amsterdam in irons, in an open cart, in the heat of July.
12The magistrates questioned him over several days. They had his books on the table. They were not much interested in the books, for the books were there, and he did not deny a line of them. They were interested in who stood behind him.
13"You are a physician," they said. "This is not a physician's matter. Who taught you these opinions? You have kept company with the Jew Spinoza. Did he help you write it? Did he read it before it went to the press?"
14Mark what Adriaan did then, for it is the hinge of this story. He was a torch, and he had never in his life held his tongue when he might speak. But a man can learn the Measure in an hour, if the hour is hard enough.
15He said that he knew Spinoza, yes, and had been some few times in his company. He said he had never spoken with him of the book. He said that no one had helped him, that no one had read it, that every word of it was his own and the fault of it his alone. They asked again in other ways, and he said the same again. The clerk wrote it down, and it may be read to this day.
16One of the magistrates wished to have his right thumb struck off, so that he could not hold a pen, and his tongue bored through with a hot iron, and thirty years in the cells after. The others thought that too much. They gave him ten years in the Rasp-House, ten years of exile after that, and a fine that took everything he owned.
17Hear what the Rasp-House was. It stood on the Heiligeweg, and over its gate was carved a carter with a whip, driving lions and wolves yoked to a wagon. Inside, men were chained two by two to a great saw with many blades, and under the saw was laid a log of red dye-wood from Brazil, harder than oak. They rasped it to powder, twelve hours in the day. The powder went to the dyers to make red cloth. A pair of men who did not fill their measure by evening were beaten.
18The red dust hung in that place like fog. It got into the bread and the water and the eyes. Strong thieves lasted some years at it. Adriaan Koerbagh was a doctor of thirty-five who had never lifted anything heavier than a book.
19Word of all this went out to Voorburg in a letter from the bookseller Rieuwertsz, written small, without a name at the foot.
20The grinder of glass read it at his bench. Then he did what was not like him. He left a lens half-ground on the lathe, and he took the canal boat to Amsterdam, the city where he was cursed, and walked through streets where any man of his own people who met him must turn his face to the wall.
21He went to the Heiligeweg and stood across the way from the gate with the carved whip. He could not go in. A man under his own cloud, asking to see that prisoner, would only have brought the questioners back with new questions. He knew it. So he stood in the street, as his brother had once stood across a canal from him, and listened.
22He could hear the saws. It was a dull, tearing sound that did not stop. Somewhere under it his friend was working, who had kept his name out of the clerk's book. He stood there until the lamplighter came. Then he went to Rieuwertsz's shop and sat in the back among the bales of paper, and for a long time he did not speak.
23"He did it in Dutch," Rieuwertsz said at last. "If he had done it in Latin they would have fined him and let him go. It was the Dutch they could not forgive."
24"I know it," said the grinder. "He wished to give it to everyone at once. I told him the straw was wet." He looked at his hands, which were grey with glass. "And I was right, Jan. I take no joy in it. I was right, and he is in there, and I am out here with clean wrists."
25Adriaan's body gave way in the first winter. They moved him to another house of correction where the work was lighter, but it was too late. He died in the autumn of the next year, fifteen months after the cart brought him in. He had not taken back a word.
26Now hear what the grinder of glass did with his grief.
27He had been at work for years on his great book, the one written line under line like geometry. He had set it aside some while before, because the preachers were growing stronger in the land and he had felt the need to answer them. Now he took up that answer and finished it, quickly and coldly, as a man forges a tool he needs by morning.
28It was a book about the freedom to think. It read the holy books as Adriaan had wished them read: with care, with knowledge of the old tongues, as writings set down by men in their own times for their own people. He knew those writings as few Christians living knew them, for he had been the best pupil of his school. He did not mock them. He asked only what they in truth said, and what they did not.
29And it said a thing about cities and rulers that had not been said so plainly before. A state is not made to keep men in fear. It is made so that men may live without fear, and use their own reason, and not be turned from thinking beings into beasts or puppets. He wrote it in one line that is remembered: "the true aim of government is liberty."
30He wrote that a ruler can chain a man's hands and stop his mouth, but cannot make him believe; that laws against opinions catch only the honest, since rogues will say whatever is wanted; and that a city which jails its truthful men to keep the peace has kept nothing worth having. He did not put Adriaan's name in it. He did not need to. Everyone in Holland who read that page saw the Rasp-House gate.
31Then the question was how to bring it out, and here the banked fire and the torch parted ways once more.
32He wrote it in Latin, for the learned, and he would not have it otherwise. He put no name on it. Rieuwertsz printed it in his own shop in Amsterdam, at night, and on the first page set the name of a printer who did not exist, in the city of Hamburg, where no Dutch sheriff could knock.
33It did not stay hidden a season. The style was known, and the learning in Hebrew gave him away, for who else could it be? Soon the preachers were calling it a book forged in hell by a renegade Jew with the devil at his elbow. Synods met to condemn it. Professors who had never agreed on anything agreed on this. Men who had been his courteous letter-friends wrote to say they had been deceived in him.
34And it was read. It went from hand to hand under false covers, bound as a book of medicine or a history of Spain. It was read in Leiden and in Paris and in London, by men who cursed it at table and sat up over it at night.
35Then he heard that a friend, meaning well, was having it put into Dutch.
36He wrote at once to stop it. He begged, in the letter, that the thing be prevented by every means. Some thought this cold of him, then and afterward. Was the truth for scholars only? Had Adriaan died for nothing?
37But he had stood in the Heiligeweg and listened to the saws. He reckoned thus: while the book was in Latin the magistrates could look aside, and it would go on quietly opening minds, one by one, among those who would carry it further. Put into Dutch, it would be banned within the week, and the Latin with it, and the printer taken. One door held open for years was worth more than a gate thrown wide for a day and then bricked up.
38You may weigh for yourself whether he judged rightly. There were two fires in this tale. One burned high and was put out. One burned low and lasted. The Whole had use for both: the low fire would not have burned so steadily if it had not seen what became of the high one, and the high one is remembered because the low one lived to write.
39The Latin book was banned at last, four years on. By then it was in every library that mattered, and could not be called back.
40In the year it came out, he left the village for the city of The Hague. Some say he wished to be nearer his friends. Some say he wished to be nearer the men who ruled Holland in those years, the brothers De Witt, who were no lovers of the preachers and under whose hand a quiet man might be left in peace.
41He took a room at the top of a house on a back canal, where a painter of that city lived with his wife and many children. The painter's name was Hendrik van der Spyck. He was a plain Lutheran who went to church twice on Sunday, and he never read a word his lodger wrote. But he came to love him, and you will see that he proved it.
42The grinder carried his own goods up the stairs: the lathe, the chest of books, the bed that had been his father's. He hung on its nail the coat with the knife-cut in it.
43That coat had company now, though it could not be hung on a nail. He carried with him the sound of the saws.
44He set his lamp at the end of the new bench. He took out again the great book, the geometry of God and the mind and the passions, and went on with it where he had left off. He wrote more slowly now, and he kept the pages in a writing desk that had a lock.
45He thought that under the brothers De Witt the worst was over. He was wrong. Now hear what he saw from that window, and how near he came to dying in the street.