 they are all at your service; and I freely make you a present of
'em, on condition, you give me all your attention to this chapter.
    Though my father said, »he knew not how it happen'd,« -- yet he knew very
well, how it happen'd; -- and at the instant he spoke it, was pre-determined in
his mind, to give my uncle Toby a clear account of the matter by a metaphysical
dissertation upon the subject of duration and its simple modes, in order to shew
my uncle Toby, by what mechanism and mensurations in the brain it came to pass,
that the rapid succession of their ideas, and the eternal scampering of
discourse from one thing to another, since Dr. Slop had come into the room, had
lengthened out so short a period, to so inconceivable an extent. -- »I know not
how it happens,« -- cried my father, -- »but it seems an age.«
    - 'Tis owing, entirely, quoth my uncle Toby, to the succession of our ideas.
    My father, who had an itch in common with all philosophers, of reasoning
upon every thing which happened, and accounting for it too, -- proposed infinite
pleasure to himself in this, of the succession of ideas, and had not the least
apprehension of having it snatch'd out of his hands by my uncle Toby, who
(honest man!) generally took every thing as it happened; -- and who, of all men
in the world, troubled his brain the least with abstruse thinking; - the ideas
of time and space, -- or how we came by those ideas, -- or of what stuff they
were made, - or whether they were born with us, -- or we pick'd them up
afterwards as we went along, - or whether we did it in frocks, - or not till we
had got into breeches, - with a thousand other inquiries and disputes about
INFINITY, PRESCIENCE, LIBERTY, NECESSITY, and so forth, upon whose desperate and
unconquerable theories, so many fine heads have been turned and crack'd, - never
did my uncle Toby's the least injury at all; my father knew it, - and was no
less surprised, than he was disappointed with my uncle's fortuitous solution.
    Do you understand the theory of that affair? replied my father.
    Not I, quoth my uncle.
    -- But you have some ideas, said my father, of what you talk about
