The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [110]
Not any one of these was more diverting, I say, in this whimsical theatre of ours,—than what frequently arose out of this self-same chapter of long noses,——especially when my father’s imagination was heated with the enquiry, and nothing would serve him but to heat my uncle Toby’s too.
My uncle Toby would give my father all possible fair play in this attempt; and with infinite patience would sit smoaking his pipe for whole hours together, whilst my father was practising upon his head, and trying every accessible avenue to drive Prignitz and Scroderus’s solutions into it.
Whether they were above my uncle Toby’s reason,——or contrary to it,——or that his brain was like damp tinder, and no spark could possibly take hold,——or that it was so full of saps, mines, blinds, curtins, and such military disqualifications to his seeing clearly into Prignitz and Scroderus’s doctrines,—I say not,—let school-men—scullions, anatomists, and engineers, fight for it amongst themselves.——
’twas some misfortune, I make no doubt, in this affair, that my father had every word of it to translate for the benefit of my uncle Toby, and render out of Slawkenbergius’s Latin, of which, as he was no great master, his translation was not always of the purest,—and generally least so where ’twas most wanted,——this naturally open’d a door to a second misfortune;—that in the warmer paroxisms of his zeal to open my uncle Toby’s eyes——my father’s ideas run on, as much faster than the translation, as the translation outmoved my uncle Toby’s;——neither the one or the other added much to the perspicuity of my father’s lecture.
CHAP. XL
The gift of ratiocination and making syllogisms,—I mean in man,—for in superior classes of beings, such as angels and spirits,—’tis all done, may it please your worships, as they tell me, by INTUITION;—and beings inferior, as your worships all know,——syllogize by their noses:1 though there is an island swiming in the sea, though not altogether at its ease, whose inhabitants, if my intelligence deceives me not, are so wonderfully gifted, as to syllogize after the same fashion, and oft-times to make very well out too:——but that’s neither here nor there——
The gift of doing it as it should be, amongst us,—or the great and principal act of ratiocination in man, as logicians tell us, is the finding out the agreement or disagreement of two ideas one with another, by the intervention of a third; (called the medius terminus) just as a man, as Locke well observes, by a yard, finds two mens nine-pin-alleys to be of the same length, which could not be brought together, to measure their equality, by juxta-position.2
Had the same great reasoner looked on, as my father illustrated his systems of noses, and observed my uncle Toby’s deportment,—what great attention he gave to every word,—and as oft as he took his pipe from his mouth, with what wonderful seriousness he contemplated the length of it,—surveying it transversely as he held it betwixt his finger and his thumb,——then foreright,—then this way, and then that, in all its possible directions and foreshortenings,——he would have concluded my uncle Toby had got hold of the medius terminus; and was syllogizing and measuring with it the truth of each hypothesis of long noses, in order as my father laid them before him. This by the bye, was more than my father wanted,—his aim in all the pains he was at in these philosophic lectures,—was to enable my uncle Toby not to discuss,——but comprehend——to hold the grains and scruples of learning,—not to weigh them.—My uncle Toby, as you will read in the next chapter, did neither the one or the other.
CHAP. XLI
’Tis a pity, cried my father one winter’s night, after a three hours painful translation of Slawkenbergius,