Explore "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" by Laurence Sterne on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
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 ofttimes 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 ninepin-alleys to be of the same length, which could not be brought together, to measure their equality, by juxtaposition.