The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman
of Christian-names, and that other previous point thereto,—you was led,
I think, into an opinion,—(and I am sure I said as much) that my father
was a gentleman altogether as odd and whimsical in fifty other
opinions. In truth, there was not a stage in the life of man, from the
very first act of his begetting,——down to the lean and slippered
pantaloon in his second childishness, but he had some favourite notion
to himself, springing out of it, as sceptical, and as far out of the
high-way of thinking, as these two which have been explained.
—Mr. _Shandy_, my father, Sir, would see nothing in the light in which
others placed it;—he placed things in his own light;—he would weigh
nothing in common scales;—no, he was too refined a researcher to lie
open to so gross an imposition.—To come at the exact weight of things
in the scientific steel-yard, the fulcrum, he would say, should be
almost invisible, to avoid all friction from popular tenets;—without
this the minutiæ of philosophy, which would always turn the balance,
will have no weight at all. Knowledge, like matter, he would affirm,
was divisible _in infinitum_;——that the grains and scruples were as
much a part of it, as the gravitation of the whole world.—In a word, he
would say, error was error,—no matter where it fell,——whether in a
fraction,——or a pound,—’twas alike fatal to truth, and she was kept
down at the bottom of her well, as inevitably by a mistake in the dust
of a butterfly’s wing,——as in the disk of the sun, the moon, and all
the stars of heaven put together.
He would often lament that it was for want of considering this
properly, and of applying it skilfully to civil matters, as well as to
speculative truths, that so many things in this world were out of
joint;——that the political arch was giving way;——and that the very
foundations of our excellent constitution in church and state, were so
sapped as estimators had reported.
You cry out, he would say, we are a ruined, undone people. Why? he
would ask, making use of the sorites or syllogism of _Zeno_ and
_Chrysippus_, without knowing it belonged to them.—Why? why are we a
ruined people?—Because we are corrupted.—Whence is it, dear Sir, that
we are corrupted?——Because we are needy;——our poverty, and not our
wills, consent.——And wherefore, he would add, are we needy?—From the
neglect, he would answer, of our pence and our halfpence:—Our bank
notes, Sir, our guineas,—nay our shillings take care of themselves.
’Tis the same, he would say, throughout the whole circle of the
sciences;—the great, the established points of them, are not to be
broke in upon.—The laws of nature will defend themselves;—but
error——(he would add, looking earnestly at my mother)——error, Sir,
creeps in thro’ the minute holes and small crevices which human nature
leaves unguarded.
This turn of thinking in my father, is what I had to remind you of:—The
point you are to be informed of, and which I have reserved for this
place, is as follows.
Amongst the many and excellent reasons, with which my father had urged
my mother to accept of Dr. _Slop_’s assistance preferably to that of
the old woman,——there was one of a very singular nature; which, when he
had done arguing the matter with her as a Christian, and came to argue
it over again with her as a philosopher, he had put his whole strength
to, depending indeed upon it as his sheet-anchor.——It failed him, tho’
from no defect in the argument itself; but that, do what he could, he
was not able for his soul to make her comprehend the drift of
it.——Cursed luck!——said he to himself, one afternoon, as he walked out
of the room, after he had been stating it for an hour and a half to
her, to no manner of purpose;—cursed luck! said he, biting his lip as
he shut the door,——for a man to be master of one of the finest chains
of reasoning in nature,——and have a wife at the same time with such a
head-piece, that he cannot hang up a single inference within side of
it, to save his soul from destruction.
This argument, though it was entirely lost upon my mother,——had more
weight with him, than all his other arguments joined together:—I will
therefore endeavour to do it justice,—and set it forth with all the
perspicuity I am master of.
My father set out upon the strength of these two following axioms:
_First_, That an ounce of a man’s own wit, was worth a ton of other
people’s; and,
_Secondly_, (Which by the bye, was the ground-work of the first
axiom,——tho’ it comes last) That every man’s wit must come from every
man’s own soul,——and no other body’s.
Now, as it was plain to my father, that all souls were by nature
equal,——and that the great difference between the most acute and the
most obtuse understanding——was from no original sharpness or bluntness
of one thinking substance above or below another,——but arose merely
from the lucky or unlucky organization of the body, in that part where
the soul principally took up her residence,——he had made it the subject
of his enquiry to find out the identical place.
Now, from the best accounts he had been able to get of this matter, he
was satisfied it could not be where _Des Cartes_ had fixed it, upon the
top of the _pineal_ gland of the brain; which, as he philosophized,
formed a cushion for her about the size of a marrow pea; tho’ to speak
the truth, as so many nerves did terminate all in that one place,—’twas
no bad conjecture;——and my father had certainly fallen with that great
philosopher plumb into the centre of the mistake, had it not been for
my uncle _Toby_, who rescued him out of it, by a story he told him of a
_Walloon_ officer at the battle of _Landen_, who had one part of his
brain shot away by a musket-ball,—and another part of it taken out
after by a _French_ surgeon; and after all, recovered, and did his duty
very well without it.
If death, said my father, reasoning with himself, is nothing but the
separation of the soul from the body;—and if it is true that people can
walk about and do their business without brains,—then certes the soul
does not inhabit there. Q.E.D.
As for that certain, very thin, subtle and very fragrant juice which
_Coglionissimo Borri_, the great _Milaneze_ physician affirms, in a
letter to _Bartholine_, to have discovered in the cellulæ of the
occipital parts of the cerebellum, and which he likewise affirms to be
the principal seat of the reasonable soul, (for, you must know, in
these latter and more enlightened ages, there are two souls in every
man living,—the one, according to the great _Metheglingius_, being
called the _Animus_, the other, the _Anima_;)—as for the opinion, I say
of _Borri_,—my father could never subscribe to it by any means; the
very idea of so noble, so refined, so immaterial, and so exalted a
being as the _Anima_, or even the _Animus_, taking up her residence,
and sitting dabbling, like a tad-pole all day long, both summer and
winter, in a puddle,——or in a liquid of any kind, how thick or thin
soever, he would say, shocked his imagination; he would scarce give the
doctrine a hearing.
What, therefore, seemed the least liable to objections of any, was that
the chief sensorium, or head-quarters of the soul, and to which place
all intelligences were referred, and from whence all her mandates were
issued,—was in, or near, the cerebellum,—or rather somewhere about the
_medulla oblongata_, wherein it was generally agreed by _Dutch_
anatomists, that all the minute nerves from all the organs of the seven
senses concentered, like streets and winding alleys, into a square.
So far there was nothing singular in my father’s opinion,—he had the
best of philosophers, of all ages and climates, to go along with
him.——But here he took a road of his own, setting up another _Shandean_
hypothesis upon these corner-stones they had laid for him;——and which
said hypothesis equally stood its ground; whether the subtilty and
fineness of the soul depended upon the temperature and clearness of the
said liquor, or of the finer net-work and texture in the cerebellum
itself; which opinion he favoured.
He maintained, that next to the due care to be taken in the act of
propagation of each individual, which required all the thought in the
world, as it laid the foundation of this incomprehensible contexture,
in which wit, memory, fancy, eloquence, and what is usually meant by
the name of good natural parts, do consist;—that next to this and his
Christian-name, which were the two original and most efficacious causes
of all;——that the third cause, or rather what logicians call the _Causa
sina qua non_, and without which all that was done was of no manner of
significance,——was the preservation of this delicate and fine-spun web,
from the havock which was generally made in it by the violent
compression and crush which the head was made to undergo, by the
nonsensical method of bringing us into the world by that foremost.
——This requires explanation.
My father, who dipped into all kinds of books, upon looking into
_Lithopædus Senonesis de Portu difficili_,[4] published by _Adrianus
Smelvgot_, had found out, that the lax and pliable state of a child’s
head in parturition, the bones of the cranium having no sutures at that
time, was such,——that by force of the woman’s efforts, which, in strong
labour-pains, was equal, upon an average, to the weight of 470 pounds
avoirdupois acting perpendicularly upon it;—it so happened, that in 49
instances out of 50, the said head was compressed and moulded into the
shape of an oblong conical piece of dough, such as a pastry-cook
generally rolls up in order to make a pye of.—Good God! cried my
father, what havock and destruction must this make in the infinitely
fine and tender texture of the cerebellum!—Or if there is such a juice
as _Borri_ pretends—is it not enough to make the clearest liquid in the
world both seculent and mothery?
But how great was his apprehension, when he farther understood, that
this force acting upon the very vertex of the head, not only injured
the brain itself, or cerebrum,—but that it necessarily squeezed and
propelled the cerebrum towards the cerebellum, which was the immediate
seat of the understanding!——Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
cried my father,——can any soul withstand this shock?—No wonder the
intellectual web is so rent and tattered as we see it; and that so many
of our best heads are no better than a puzzled skein of silk,——all
perplexity,——all confusion within-side.
But when my father read on, and was let into the secret, that when a
child was turned topsy-turvy, which was easy for an operator to do, and
was extracted by the feet;—that instead of the cerebrum being propelled
towards the cerebellum, the cerebellum, on the contrary, was propelled
simply towards the cerebrum, where it could do no manner of hurt:——By
heavens! cried he, the world is in conspiracy to drive out what little
wit God has given us,——and the professors of the obstetric art are
listed into the same conspiracy.—What is it to me which end of my son
comes foremost into the world, provided all goes right after, and his
cerebellum escapes uncrushed?
It is the nature of an hypothesis, when once a man has conceived it,
that it assimilates every thing to itself, as proper nourishment; and,
from the first moment of your begetting it, it generally grows the
stronger by every thing you see, hear, read, or understand. This is of
great use.
When my father was gone with this about a month, there was scarce a
phænomenon of stupidity or of genius, which he could not readily solve
by it;—it accounted for the eldest son being the greatest blockhead in
the family.——Poor devil, he would say,—he made way for the capacity of
his younger brothers.——It unriddled the observations of drivellers and
monstrous heads,——shewing _à priori_, it could not be