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By Root 1730 0

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,2 but he had some favourite notion to himself, springing out of it, as sceptical, and as far out of the high-way 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,3 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;4—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 well5 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 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;6—that the political arch was giving way;—and that the very foundations of our excellent constitution in church and state, were so sapp’d as estimators had reported.

You cry out, he would say, we are a ruined, undone people.7——Why?—he would ask, making use of the sorites or syllogism of Zeno and Chrysippus,8 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.9——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 matter 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.10———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 walk’d 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 head-piece, that he cannot hang up a single inference within side of it, to save his soul from destruction.

This argument, though it was intirely lost upon my mother,—had more weight with him, than all his other arguments joined together:——I