 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, tho' it was intirely 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 tun of other people's;
and,
    Secondly, (Which, by the bye, was the ground- 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 philosophised, form'd 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 center 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
