The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (pdf e book reader txt) 📕

When these two things are done,⁠—the curtain shall be drawn up again, and my uncle Toby, my father, and Dr. Slop, shall go on with their discourse, without any more interruption.

First, then, the matter which I have to remind you of, is this;⁠⸺⁠that from the specimens of singularity in my father’s notions in the point 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 highway 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 steelyard, 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 wings,⁠⸺⁠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 manner 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 headpiece, 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 by, was the groundwork 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 organisation 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