Pray, Sir, in all the reading which you have ever read, did you ever read such a book as _Locke’s_ Essay upon the Human Understanding? ----Don’t answer me rashly--because many, I know, quote the book, who have not read it--and many have read it who understand it not: --If either of these is your case, as I write to instruct, I will tell you in three words what the book is. --It is a history. --A history! of who? what? where? when? Don’t hurry yourself ----It is a history-book, Sir (which may possibly recommend it to the world) of what passes in a man’s own mind; and if you will say so much of the book, and no more, believe me, you will cut no contemptible figure in a metaphysick circle. But this by the way. Now if you will venture to go along with me, and look down into the bottom of this matter, it will be found that the cause of obscurity and confusion, in the mind of a man, is threefold. Dull organs, dear Sir, in the first place. Secondly, slight and transient impressions made by the objects, when the said organs are not dull. And thirdly, a memory like unto a sieve, not able to retain what it has received. --Call down _Dolly_ your chambermaid, and I will give you my cap and bell along with it, if I make not this matter so plain that _Dolly_ herself should understand it as well as _Malbranch_. ----When _Dolly_ has indited her epistle to _Robin_, and has thrust her arm into the bottom of her pocket hanging by her right side; --take that opportunity to recollect that the organs and faculties of perception can, by nothing in this world, be so aptly typified and explained as by that one thing which _Dolly’s_ hand is in search of. --Your organs are not so dull that I should inform you--’tis an inch, Sir, of red seal-wax. When this is melted, and dropped upon the letter, if _Dolly_ fumbles too long for her thimble, till the wax is over hardened, it will not receive the mark of her thimble from the usual impulse which was wont to imprint it. Very well. If _Dolly’s_ wax, for want of better, is bees-wax, or of a temper too soft, --tho’ it may receive, --it will not hold the impression, how hard soever _Dolly_ thrusts against it; and last of all, supposing the wax good, and eke the thimble, but applied thereto in careless haste, as her Mistress rings the bell; ----in any one of these three cases the print left by the thimble will be as unlike the prototype as a brass-jack. Now you must understand that not one of these was the true cause of the confusion in my uncle _Toby’s_ discourse; and it is for that very reason I enlarge upon them so long, after the manner of great physiologists--to shew the world, what it did _not_ arise from. What it did arise from, I have hinted above, and a fertile source of obscurity it is, --and ever will be, --and that is the unsteady uses of words, which have perplexed the clearest and most exalted understandings.