alked 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 entirely 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 ton 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 gland of the brain; which, as he philosophized, formed
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 centre 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 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.