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 chamber-maid, 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 Ienlarge 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.
It is ten to one (at Arthur's) whether you have ever read the literary histories of past ages;--if you have, what terrible battles, 'yclept logomachies, have they occasioned and perpetuated with so much gall and ink-shed,--that a good-natured man cannot read the accounts of them without tears in his eyes.
Gentle critick! when thou hast weighed all this, and considered within thyself how much of thy own knowledge, discourse, and conversation has been pestered and disordered, at one time or other, by this, and this only:--What a pudder and racket in Councils about (Greek); and in the Schools of the learned about power and about spirit;--about essences, and about quintessences;--about substances, and about space.--What confusion in greater Theatres from words of little meaning, and as indeterminate a sense! when thou considerest this, thou wilt not wonder at my uncle Toby's perplexities,--thou wilt drop a tear of pity upon his scarp and his counterscarp;--his glacis and his covered way;--his ravelin and his half-moon: 'Twas not by ideas,--by Heaven; his life was put in jeopardy by words.
