This turn of thinking in my father, is what I had to remind you of:—The point you are to be informed of, and which I have reserved for this place, is as follows. Amongst the many and excellent reasons, with which my father had urged my mother to accept of Dr. _Slop_’s assistance preferably to that of the old woman,——there was one of a very singular nature; which, when he had done arguing the matter with her as a Christian, and came to argue it over again with her as a philosopher, he had put his whole strength to, depending indeed upon it as his sheet-anchor.——It failed him, tho’ from no defect in the argument itself; but that, do what he could, he was not able for his soul to make her comprehend the drift of it.——Cursed luck!——said he to himself, one afternoon, as he walked out of the room, after he had been stating it for an hour and a half to her, to no manner of purpose;—cursed luck! said he, biting his lip as he shut the door,——for a man to be master of one of the finest chains of reasoning in nature,——and have a wife at the same time with such a head-piece, that he cannot hang up a single inference within side of it, to save his soul from destruction. This argument, though it was entirely lost upon my mother,——had more weight with him, than all his other arguments joined together:—I will therefore endeavour to do it justice,—and set it forth with all the perspicuity I am master of. My father set out upon the strength of these two following axioms: _First_, That an ounce of a man’s own wit, was worth a ton of other people’s; and, _Secondly_, (Which by the bye, was the ground-work of the first axiom,——tho’ it comes last) That every man’s wit must come from every man’s own soul,——and no other body’s. 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 organization 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.