Whether they were above my uncle _Toby’s_ reason------or contrary to it------or that his brain was like _damp_ timber, and no spark could possibly take hold----or that it was so full of saps, mines, blinds, curtins, and such military disqualifications to his seeing clearly into _Prignitz_ and _Scroderus’s_ doctrines ----I say not--let schoolmen--scullions, anatomists, and engineers, fight for it among themselves---- ’Twas some misfortune, I make no doubt, in this affair, that my father had every word of it to translate for the benefit of my uncle _Toby_, and render out of _Slawkenbergius’s_ _Latin_, of which, as he was no great master, his translation was not always of the purest----and generally least so where ’twas most wanted. --This naturally open’d a door to a second misfortune; ----that in the warmer paroxysms of his zeal to open my uncle _Toby’s_ eyes------my father’s ideas ran on as much faster than the translation, as the translation outmoved my uncle _Toby’s_------ neither the one or the other added much to the perspicuity of my father’s lecture. CHAPTER XL 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 men’s nine-pin-alleys to be of the same length, which could not be brought together, to measure their equality, by _juxta-position_.