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 organisation 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,—’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.
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