The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman Laurence Sterne (short novels to read .txt) 📖

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.

As for that certain, very thin, subtle and very fragrant juice which Coglionissimo Borri, the great Milanese physician affirms, in a letter to Bartholine, 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, being called the Animus, the other, the Anima;)⁠—as for the 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 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 cornerstones 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 network 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 efficacious causes of all;⁠⸺⁠that the third cause, or rather what logicians call the Causa sine quâ non, and without which all that was done was of no manner of significance,⁠⸺⁠was the preservation of this delicate and finespun web, from the havock which was generally made in it by the violent compression and crush which the head was made to undergo, by the nonsensical method of bringing us into the world by that foremost.

⸺⁠This requires explanation.

My father, who dipped into all kinds of books, upon looking into Lithopædus Senonesis de Partu difficili,5 published 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 the weight of 470 pounds averdupois acting perpendicularly upon it;⁠—it so happened, that in 49 instances out of 50, the said head was compressed and moulded into the shape of an oblong conical piece of dough, such as a pastry-cook generally rolls up in order to make a pye of.⁠—Good God! cried my father, what havock 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 liquid in the world both feculent and mothery?

But how great was his apprehension, when he farther 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 defend us! cried my father,⁠⸺⁠can any soul withstand this 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 cerebellum, the cerebellum, on the contrary, was propelled simply towards the cerebrum, where it could do no manner of hurt:⁠⸺⁠By heavens! cried he, the world is in conspiracy to drive out what little wit God has given us,⁠⸺⁠and the professors of the obstetric art are lifted 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 everything to itself, as proper nourishment; and, from the first moment of your begetting it, it generally grows the stronger