When my father had danced his white bear backwards and forwards through half a dozen pages, he closed the book for good an’ all,—and in a kind of triumph redelivered it into Trim’s hand, with a nod to lay it upon the ’scrutoire, where he found it.⸺ Tristram , said he, shall be made to conjugate every word in the dictionary, backwards and forwards the same way;⸺every word, Yorick , by this means, you see, is converted into a thesis or an hypothesis;—every thesis and hypothesis have an offspring of propositions;—and each proposition has its own consequences and conclusions; every one of which leads the mind on again, into fresh tracks of enquiries and doubtings.⸺The force of this engine, added my father, is incredible in opening a child’s head.⸺’Tis enough, brother Shandy , cried my uncle Toby , to burst it into a thousand splinters.⸺
I presume, said Yorick , smiling,—it must be owing to this,⸺(for let logicians say what they will, it is not to be accounted for sufficiently from the bare use of the ten predicaments)⸺That the famous Vincent Quirino , amongst the many other astonishing feats of his childhood, of which the Cardinal Bembo has given the world so exact a story,—should be able to paste up in the public schools at Rome , so early as in the eighth year of his age, no less than four thousand five hundred and fifty different theses, upon the most abstruse points of the most abstruse theology;—and to defend and maintain them in such sort, as to cramp and dumbfound his opponents.⸺What is that, cried my father, to what is told us of Alphonsus Tostatus , who, almost in his nurse’s arms, learned all the sciences and liberal arts without being taught any one of them?⸺What shall we say of the great Piereskius? —That’s the very man, cried my uncle Toby , I once told you of, brother Shandy , who walked a matter of five hundred miles, reckoning from Paris to Shevling ,