 little out of its due course; -
for it should have been told a hundred and fifty pages ago, but that I foresaw
then 'twould come in pat hereafter, and be of more advantage here than
elsewhere. -- Writers had need look before them to keep up the spirit and
connection of what they have in hand.
    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 point previous 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 slipper'd 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 lay 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
should 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
