I HAVE dropped the curtain over this scene for a minute,-
to remind you of one thing-and to inform you of another.
What I have to inform you, comes, I own, a little out of
its due course;-for it should have been told a hundred
and fifty pages ago, but that I foresaw then 'twould come
in pat hereafter, and be of more advantage here than else-
where.-Writers had need look before them, to keep up the
spirit and connection of what they have in hand.
When these two things are done,-the curtain shall be
drawn up again, and my uncle Toby, my father, and Dr
Slop, shall go on with their discourse, without any more
interruption.
First, then, the matter which I have to remind you of, is
this;-that from the specimens of singularity in my father's
notions in the point of Christian names, and 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 slippered pantaloon in his second childishness, 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, the fulcrum, he would say, should
be almost invisible, to avoid all friction from popular tenets;
-without this the minutiae of philosophy, which should
always turn the balance, will have no weight at all. Know-
ledge, like matter, he would affirm, was divisible in infini-
tum,-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 well 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 con-
sidering 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;-that the political arch was
giving way;-and that the very foundations of our excellent
constitution in church and state, were so sapped as estima-
tors had reported.
You cry out, he would say, we are a ruined, undone people.
-Why? he would ask, making use of the sorites or syllog-
ism of Zeno and Chrysippus, 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 cor-
rupted?-Because we are needy;-our poverty, and not our
wills, consent.-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 broken in upon.-The laws of nature will
defend themselves;-but error-(he would add, looking
earnestly at my mother)-error, Sir, creeps in through the
minute holes and small crevices, which human nature
leaves unguarded.
This turn of thin-king 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.
-it failed him; though 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 I
-said he to himself, one afternoon, as he walked out of
the room, after he had been stating it for an hour and a
half to her, to no manner of purpose;-pursed 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:-l 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,-though 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; though, to speak the truth,
as so many nerves did terminate all in that one place,-
)l 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 cartes the soul does not
inhabit there. Q.E.D.
As for that certain, very thin, subtle, and very fragrant
juice which Coglionissimo Borri, the great Milanese physi-
cian, affirms, in a letter to Bartholine, to have discovered
in the cellulae 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,
being called the Animus, the other the Anima);-as for
this opinion, I say, of Borri,-my father could never sub-
scribe 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 tadpole, 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, shocked his imagination; he
would scarce give the doctrine a hearing.
What, therefore, seemed the least liable to objections of
any, was, that the chief sensorium, or headquarters of the
soul, 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 senses 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 subtlety 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 contexture in which wit, memory,
fancy, eloquence, and what is usually meant by the name
of good natural parts, do consist;-that next to this and his
Christian name, which were the two original and most effi-
cacious causes of all;-that the third cause, or rather what
logicians call the Causa sine qua non, and without which
all that was done was of no manner of significance,-was
the preservation of this delicate and fine-spun web, from the
havoc which was generally made in it by the violent com-
pression and crush which the head was made to undergo,
by the nonsensical method of bringing us into the world
by that part foremost.
-This requires explanation.
My father, who dipped into all kinds of books, upon
looking into Lithopaedus Senonesis de Partu difficili,1 pub-
lished by Adrianus Smelvgot, had found out, That the lax
and pliable state of a child's head in parturition, the bones
of the cranium having no sutures at that time, was such,-
that by force of the woman's efforts, which, in strong labour-
pains, was equal, upon an average, to a weight Of 470 pounds
averdupoise acting perpendicularly upon it;-it so hap-
pened that, in 49 instances out of 50, the said head was
compressed and moulded into the shape of an oblong coni-
cal piece of dough, such as a pastry-cook generally rolls up
in order to make a pie of.-Good God I cried my father,
what havoc and destruction must this make in the infinitely
fine and tender texture of the cerebellum,-Or if there is
such a juice as Borri pretends,-is it not enough to make the
clearest liquor in the world both feculent and mothery?
But how great was his apprehension, when he further
understood, that this force, acting upon the very vertex of
the head, not only injured the brain itself or cerebrum,-but
that it necessarily squeezed and propelled the cerebrum
towards the cerebellum, which was the immediate seat of
the understanding!-Angels and Ministers of grace de-
fend us! cried my father,-can any soul withstand this

1. The author is here twice mistaken;-for Lithopaedus should be
wrote thus, Lithopaedii Senonensis Icon. 'Me second mistake is, that
this Lithopaedus is not an author, but a drawing of a petrified child.
The account of this, published by Albosius, 1580, may be seen at the
end of Cordacus's works in Spachius. Mr Tristram Shandy has been
led into this error, either from seeing Lithopaedus's name of late in a
catalogue of learned writers in Dr -, or by mistaking Lithopaedus
for Trinecavellius.-from the too great similitude of the names.
shock?-No wonder the intellectual web is so rent and
tattered as we see it; and that so many of our best heads
are no better than a puzzled skein of silk,-all perplexity,-
all confusion within-side.
But when my father read on, and was let into the secret,
that when a child was turned topsy-turvy, which was easy
for an operator to do, and was extracted by the feet;- that
instead of the cerebrum being propelled towards the cere-
bellum, the cerebellum, on the contrary, was propelled
simply towards the cerebrum where it could do no manner
of hurt: -By heavens I cried he, the world is in a con-
spiracy to drive out what little wit God has given us,-and
the professors of the obstetric art are listed into the same
conspiracy.-What is it to me which end of my son comes
foremost into the world, provided all goes right after, and
his cerebellum escapes uncrushed?
It is the nature of an hypothesis, when once a man has
conceived it, that it assimilates every thing to itself, as
proper nourishment; and, from the first moment of your
begetting it, it generally grows the stronger by every thing
you see, hear, read, or understand. This is of great use.
When my father was gone with this about a month, there
was scarce a phenomenon of stupidity or of genius, which
he could not readily solve by it;-it accounted for the
eldest son being the greatest blockhead in the family.-
Poor devil, he would say,-he made way for the capacity
of his younger brothers.-It unriddled the observations of
drivellers and monstrous heads,-shewing a priori, it could
not be otherwise,-unless *'*' I don't know what. It wonder-
fully explained and accounted for the acumen of the Asiatic
genius, and that spritelier turn, and a more penetrating
intuition of minds, in warmer climates; not from the loose
and common-place solution of a clearer sky, and a more
perpetual sunshine, &c.-which, for aught he knew, might
as well rarify and dilute the faculties of the soul into
nothing, by one extreme,-as they are condensed in colder
climates by the other;-but he traced the affair up to its
spring-head;-shewed that, in warmer climates, nature had
laid a lighter tax upon the fairest parts of the creation;-
their pleasures more;- the necessity of their pains less,
insomuch that the pressure and resistance upon the vertex
was so slight, that the whole organization of the cerebellum
was preserved;-nay, he did not believe, in natural births,
that so much as a single thread of the net-work was broke
or displaced,-so that the soul might just act as she liked.
When my father had got so far,-what a blaze of light
did the accounts of the Caesarian section, and of the tower-
ing geniuses who had come safe into the world by it, cast
upon this hypothesis? Here you see, he would say, there
was no injury done to the sensorium;-no pressure of the
head against the pelvis;-no propulsion of the cerebrum
towards the cerebellum, either by the os pubis on this side,
or the os coxygis on that;-and, pray, what were the
happy consequences? Why, Sir, your Julius Caesar, who
gave the operation a name;-md your Hermes Trismegis-
tus, who was born so before ever the operation had a name;
-your Scipio Africanus; your Manlius Torquatus; our
Edward the Sixth,-who, had he lived, would have done the
same honour to the hypothesis: -These, and many more
who figured high in the annals of fame,-all came side-way,
Sir, into the world.
The incision of the abdomen and uterus, ran for six weeks
together in my father's head;-he had read, and was satis-
fied, that wounds in the epigastrium, and those in the
matrix, were not mortal;-so that the belly of the mother
might be opened extremely well to give a passage to the
child.-He mentioned the thing one afternoon to my
mother,-merely as a matter of fact; but seeing her turn
as pale as ashes at the very mention of it, as much as the
operation flattered his hopes,-he thought it as well to say
no more of it,-contenting himself with admiring-what
he thought was to no purpose to propose.
This was my father Mr Shandy's hypothesis; concerning
which I have only to add, that my brother Bobby did as
great honour to it (whatever he did to the family) as any
one of the great heroes we spoke of:-For happening
not only to be christened, as I told you, but to be born too,
when my father was at Epsom, being moreover my
mother's first child,-coming into the world with his head
foremost,- and turning out afterwards a lad of wonderful
slow parts,-my father spelt all these together into his
opinion; and as he had failed at one end-he was deter-
mined to try the other.
This was not to be expected from one of the sisterhood,
who are not easily to be put out of their way-and was
therefore one of my father's great reasons in favour of a
man of science, whom he could better deal with.
Of all men in the world, Dr Slop was the fittest for my
father's purpose;-for though his new invented forceps was
the armour he had proved, and what he maintained, to be
the safest instrument of deliverance,-yet, it seems, he
had scattered a word or two in his book, in favour of the
very thing which ran in my father's fancy;-though not
with a view to the soul's good in extracting by the feet, as
was my father's system,-but for reasons merely obstetrical.
This will account for the coalition betwixt my father and
Dr Slop, in the ensuing discourse, which went a little hard
against my uncle Toby.-In what manner a plain man, with
nothing but common sense, could bear up against two such
allies in science,-is hard to conceive.-You may conjecture
upon it, if you please,-and whilst your imagination is in
motion, you may encourage it to go on, and discover by
what causes and effects in nature it could come to pass,
that my uncle Toby got his modesty by the wound he re-
ceived upon his groin.-You may raise a system to account
for the loss of my nose by marriage-articles,-and shew the
world how it could happen, that I should have the misfor-
tune to be called TRISTRAM, in opposition to my father's
hypothesis, and the wish of the whole family, Godfathers
and Godmothers not excepted.-These, with fifty other
points left yet unravelled, you may endeavour to solve if
you have time;-but I tell you beforehand it will be in vain,
for not the sage Alquife, the magician in Don Beliallis of
Greece, nor the no less famous Urganda, the sorceress his
shock?-No wonder the intellectual web is so rent and
tattered as we see it; and that so many of our best heads
are no better than a puzzled skein of silk-all perplexity-
all confusion within-side.
But when my father read on, and was let into the secret,
that when a child was turned topsy-turvy, which was easy
for an operator to do, and was extracted by the feet;- that
instead of the cerebrum being propelled towards the cere-
bellum, the cerebellum, on the contrary, was propelled
simply towards the cerebrum where it could do no manner
of hurt: -By heavens I cried he, the world is in a con-
spiracy to drive out what little wit God has given us,-and
the professors of the obstetric art are listed into the same
conspiracy.-What is it to me which end of my son comes
foremost into the world, provided aR goes right after, and
his cerebellum escapes uncrushed?
It is the nature of an hypothesis, when once a man has
conceived it, that it assimilates every thing to itself, as
proper nourishment; and, from the first moment of your
begetting it, it generally grows the stronger by every thing
you see, hear, read, or understand. This is of great use.
When my father was gone with this about a month, there
was scarce a phenomenon of stupidity or of genius, which
he could not readily solve by it;-it accounted for the
eldest son being the greatest blockhead in the family.-
Poor devil, he would say-he made way for the capacity
of his younger brothers.-It unriddled the observations of
drivellers and monstrous heads,-shewing a priori, it could
not be otherwise,-unless *'*' I don't know what. It wonder-
.Lully explained and accounted for the acumen of the Asiatic
genius, and that spritelier turn, and a more penetrating
intuition of minds, in warmer climates; not from the loose
and common-place solution of a clearer sky, and a more
perpetual sunshine, &c.-which, for aught he knew, might
as well rarify and dilute the faculties of the soul into
nothing, by one extreme,-as they are condensed in colder
climates by the other;-but he traced the affair up to its
spring-head;-shewed that, in warmer climates, nature had
laid a lighter tax upon the fairest parts of the creation;-
their pleasures more;- the necessity of their pains less,
insomuch that the pressure and resistance upon the vertex
was so slight, that the whole organization of the cerebellum
was preserved;-nay, he did not believe, in natural births,
that so much as a single thread of the net-work was broke
or displaced-so that the soul might just act as she liked.
When my father had got so far-what a blaze of light
did the accounts of the Caesarian section, and of the tower-
ing geniuses who had come safe into the world by it, cast
upon this hypothesis? Here you see, he would say, there
was no injury done to the sensorium;-no pressure of the
head against the pelvis;-no propulsion of the cerebrum
towards the cerebellum, either by the os pubis on this side,
or the os coxygis on that;-and, pray, what were the
happy consequences? Why, Sir, your Julius Caesar, who
gave the operation a name;-md your Hermes Trismegis-
tus, who was born so before ever the operation had a name;
-your Scipio Africanus; your Manlius Torquatus; our
Edward the Sixth,-who, had he lived, would have done the
same honour to the hypothesis: -These, and many more
who figured high in the annals of fame-all came side-way,
Sir, into the world.
The incision of the abdomen and uterus, ran for six weeks
together in my father's head;-he had read, and was satis-
fied, that wounds in the epigastrium, and those in the
matrix, were not mortal;-so that the belly of the mother
might be opened extremely well to give a passage to the
child.-He mentioned the thing one afternoon to my
mother,-merely as a matter of fact; but seeing her turn
as pale as ashes at the very mention of it, as much as the
operation flattered his hopes-he thought it as well to say
no more of it,-contenting himself with admiring-what
he thought was to no purpose to propose.
This was my father Mr Shandy's hypothesis; concerning
which I have only to add, that my brother Bobby did as
great honour to it (whatever he did to the family) as any
one of the great heroes we spoke of:-For happening
not only to be christened, as I told you, but to be born too,
when my father was at Epsom, being moreover my
mother's first child,-coming into the world with his head
foremost- and turning out afterwards a lad of wonderful
slow parts,-my father spelt all these together into his
opinion; and as he had failed at one end-he was deter-
mined to try the other.
This was not to be expected from one of the sisterhood,
who are not easily to be put out of their way-and was
therefore one of my father's great reasons in favour of a
man of science, whom he could better deal with.
Of all men in the world, Dr Slop was the fittest for my
father's purpose;-for though his new invented forceps was
the armour he had proved, and what he maintained, to be
the safest instrument of deliverance,-yet, it seems, he
had scattered a word or two in his book, in favour of the
very thing which ran in my father's fancy;-though not
with a view to the soul's good in extracting by the feet, as
was my father's system,-but for reasons merely obstetrical.
This will account for the coalition betwixt my father and
Dr Slop, in the ensuing discourse, which went a little hard
against my uncle Toby.-In what manner a plain man, with
nothing but common sense, could bear up against two such
allies in science-is hard to conceive.-You may conjecture
upon it, if you please-and whilst your imagination is in
motion, you may encourage it to go on, and discover by
what causes and effects in nature it could come to pass,
that my uncle Toby got his modesty by the wound he re-
ceived upon his groin.-You may raise a system to account
for the loss of my nose by marriage-articles,-and shew the
world how it could happen, that I should have the misfor-
tune to be called TRISTRAM, in opposition to my father's
hypothesis, and the wish of the whole family, Godfathers
and Godmothers not excepted.-These, with fifty other
points left yet unravelled, you may endeavour to solve if
you have time;-but I tell you beforehand it will be in vain,
for not the sage Alquife, the magician in Don Beliallis of
Greece, nor the no less famous Urganda, the sorceress his
wife, (were they alive) could pretend to come within a league
of the truth.
The reader will be content to wait for a full explanation
of these matters till the next year,-when a series of things
will be laid open which he little expects.