THE gift of ratiocination and making syllogisms——I mean in man—for in
superior classes of being, such as angels and spirits——’tis all done,
may it please your worships, as they tell me, by INTUITION;—and beings
inferior, as your worships all know——syllogize by their noses: though
there is an island swimming in the sea (though not altogether at its
ease) whose inhabitants, if my intelligence deceives me not, are so
wonderfully gifted, as to syllogize after the same fashion, and
oft-times to make very well out too:——but that’s neither here nor
there——
The gift of doing it as it should be, amongst us, or—the great and
principal act of ratiocination in man, as logicians tell us, is the
finding out the agreement or disagreement of two ideas one with
another, by the intervention of a third (called the _medius terminus_);
just as a man, as _Locke_ well observes, by a yard, finds two mens
nine-pin-alleys to be of the same length, which could not be brought
together, to measure their equality, by _juxta-position._
Had the same great reasoner looked on, as my father illustrated his
systems of noses, and observed my uncle _Toby_’s deportment—what great
attention he gave to every word—and as oft as he took his pipe from his
mouth, with what wonderful seriousness he contemplated the length of
it——surveying it transversely as he held it betwixt his finger and his
thumb——then fore-right——then this way, and then that, in all its
possible directions and fore-shortenings——he would have concluded my
uncle _Toby_ had got hold of the _medius terminus_, and was syllogizing
and measuring with it the truth of each hypothesis of long noses, in
order, as my father laid them before him. This, by-the-bye, was more
than my father wanted——his aim in all the pains he was at in these
philosophick lectures—was to enable my uncle _Toby_ not to
_discuss_——but _comprehend_—to _hold_ the grains and scruples of
learning——not to _weigh_ them.——My uncle _Toby_, as you will read in
the next chapter, did neither the one or the other.