the sweat of a man’s brows, and the exsudations of a man’s brains, are as much a man’s own property as the breeches upon his backside;—which said exsudations, etc. , being dropp’d upon the said apple by the labour of finding it, and picking it up; and being moreover indissolubly wasted, and as indissolubly annex’d, by the picker up, to the thing pick’d up, carried home, roasted, peel’d, eaten, digested, and so on;⸺’tis evident that the gatherer of the apple, in so doing, has mix’d up something which was his own, with the apple which was not his own, by which means he has acquired a property;—or, in other words, the apple is John’s apple.
By the same learned chain of reasoning my father stood up for all his opinions; he had spared no pains in picking them up, and the more they lay out of the common way, the better still was his title.⸺No mortal claimed them; they had cost him moreover as much labour in cooking and digesting as in the case above, so that they might well and truly be said to be of his own goods and chattles.—Accordingly he held fast by ’em, both by teeth and claws—would fly to whatever he could lay his hands on—and, in a word, would intrench and fortify them round with as many circumvallations and breastworks, as my uncle Toby would a citadel.
There was one plaguy rub in the way of this⸺the scarcity of materials to make anything of a defence with, in case of a smart attack; inasmuch as few men of great genius had exercised their parts in writing books upon the subject of great noses: by the trotting of my lean horse, the thing is incredible! and I am quite lost in my understanding, when I am considering what a treasure of precious time and talents together has been wasted upon worse subjects—and how many millions of books in all languages, and in all possible types and bindings, have been fabricated upon points not half so much tending to the unity and peacemaking of the world. What was to be had, however, he set the greater store by; and though my father would ofttimes sport with my uncle Toby’s library—which,