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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 tun11 of other people’s; and,

Secondly, (Which, by the bye, was the ground-work 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 gland12 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,13 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 his duty very well without it.

If death, said my father, reasoning with himself, is nothing but the separation of the soul from the body;—and if it is true that people can walk about and do their business without brains,—then certes the soul does not inhabit there. Q. E. D.14

As for that certain very thin, subtle, and very fragrant juice which Coglionissimo Borri, the great Milaneze physician, affirms, in a letter to Bartholine,15 to have discovered in the cellulæ of the occipital parts of the cerebellum, and which he likewise affirms to be the principal seat of the reasonable soul (for, you must know, in these latter and more enlightened ages, there are two souls in every man living,—the one according to the great Metheglingius,16 being called the Animus, the other the Anima);17—as for this opinion, I say, of Borri,——my father could never subscribe to it by any means; the very idea of so noble, so refined, so immaterial, and so exalted a being as the Anima, or even the Animus, taking up her residence, and sitting dabbling, like a tad-pole, all day long, both summer and winter, in a puddle,—or in a liquid of any kind, how thick or thin soever, he would say, shock’d his imagination; he would scarce give the doctrine a hearing.

What, therefore, seem’d the least liable to objections of any, was, that the chief sensorium, or head-quarters of the soul,18 and to which place all intelligences were referred, and from whence all her mandates were issued,—was in, or near, the cerebellum,–or rather somewhere about the medulla oblongata, wherein it was generally agreed by Dutch anatomists, that all the minute nerves from all the organs of the seven senses19 concentered, like streets and winding alleys, into a square.

So far there was nothing singular in my father’s opinion,—he had the best of philosophers, of all ages and climates, to go along with him.——But here he took a road of his own, setting up another Shandean hypothesis upon these corner-stones they had laid for him;—and which said hypothesis equally stood its ground; whether the subtilty and fineness of the soul depended upon the temperature and clearness of the said liquor, or of the finer net-work and texture in the cerebellum itself; which opinion he favoured.

He maintained, that next to the due care to be taken in the act of propagation of each individual, which required all the thought in the world, as it laid the foundation of this incomprehensible