subjects enjoy all the delights and pleasures in parts, for it is impossible, that a kingdom, nay, a country, should be enjoyed by one person at once, except he take the pains to travel into every part, and endure the inconveniencies of going from one place to another? wherefore, since glory, delight and pleasure lives but in other men’s opinions, and can neither add tranquility to your mind nor give ease to your body, why should you desire to be Empress of a material world, and be troubled with the cares that attend government? when as by creating a world within yourself, you may enjoy all both in whole and in parts, without control or opposition; and may make what world you please, and alter it when you please, and enjoy as much pleasure and delight as a world can afford you? You have converted me, said the Duchess to the spirits, from my ambitious desire; wherefore, I’ll take your advice, reject and despise all the worlds without me, and create a world of my own. The Empress said, if I do make such a world, then I shall be mistress of two worlds, one within, and the other without me. That your Majesty may, said the spirits; and so left these two ladies to create two worlds within themselves: who did also part from each other, until such time as they had brought their worlds to perfection. The Duchess of Newcastle was most earnest and industrious to make her world, because she had none at present; and first she resolved to frame it according to the opinion of Thales, but she found herself so much troubled with daemons, that they would not suffer her to take her own will, but forced her to obey their orders and commands; which she being unwilling to do, left off from making a world that way, and began to frame one according to Pythagoras’s doctrine; but in the creation thereof, she was so puzzled with numbers, how to order and compose the several parts, that she having no skill in arithmetic, was forced also to desist from the making of that world. Then she intended to create a world according to the opinion of Plato; but she found more trouble and difficulty in that, than in the two former; for the numerous ideas having no other motion but what was derived from her mind, whence they did flow and issue out, made it a far harder business to her, to impart motion to them, than puppet-players have in giving motion to every several puppet; insomuch, that her patience was not able to endure the trouble which those ideas caused her; wherefore she annihilated also that world, and was resolved to make one according to the opinion of Epicurus; which she had no sooner begun, but the infinite atoms made such a mist, that it quite blinded the perception of her mind; neither was she able to make a vacuum as a receptacle for those atoms, or a place which they might retire into; so that partly for the want of it, and of a good order and method, the confusion of those atoms produced such strange and monstrous figures, as did more affright than delight her, and caused such a chaos in her mind, as had almost dissolved it. At last, having with much ado cleansed and cleared her mind of these dusty and misty particles, she endeavoured to create a world according to Aristotle’s opinion; but remembering that her mind, as most of the learned hold it, was immaterial, and that, according to Aristotle’s principle, out of nothing, nothing could be made; she was forced also to desist from that work, and then she fully resolved, not to take any more patterns from the ancient philosophers, but to follow the opinions of the moderns; and to that end, she endeavoured to make a world according to Descartes’s opinion; but when she had made the aethereal globules, and set them a moving by a strong and lively imagination, her mind became so dizzy with their extraordinary swift turning round, that it almost put her into a swoon; for her thoughts, but their constant tottering, did so stagger, as if they had all been drunk: wherefore she dissolved that world, and began to make another, according to Hobbes’s opinion; but when all the parts of this imaginary world came to press and drive each other, they seemed like a company of wolves that worry sheep, or like so many dogs that hunt after hares; and when she found a reaction equal to those pressures, her mind was so squeezed together, that her thoughts could neither move forward nor backward, which caused such an horrible pain in her head, that although she had dissolved that world, yet she could not, without much difficulty, settle her mind, and free it from that pain which those pressures and reactions had caused in it.
At last, when the Duchess saw that no patterns would do her any good in the framing of her world; she was resolved to make a world of her own invention, and this world was composed of sensitive and rational self-moving matter; indeed, it was composed only of the rational, which is the subtlest and purest degree of matter; for as the sensitive did move and act both to the perceptions and consistency of the body, so this degree of matter at the same point of time (for though the degrees are mixed, yet the several parts may move several ways at one time) did move to the creation of the imaginary world; which world after it was made, appeared so curious and full of variety, so well ordered and wisely governed, that it cannot possibly be expressed by words, nor the delight and pleasure which the Duchess took in making this World-of-her-own.
In the meantime the Empress was also making and dissolving several worlds in her own mind, and was so puzzled, that she could
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