Page:The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy (Volume 3).pdf/83

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hension of having it snatch'd out of his hands by my uncle Toby, who (honest man!) generally took every thing as it happened;—and who, of all men in the world, troubled his brain the least with abstruse thinking;—the ideas of time and space,—or how we came by those ideas,—or of what stuff they were made,—or whether they were born with us,—or we pick'd them up afterwards as we went along,—or whether we did it in frocks,—or not till we had got into breeches,—with a thousand other inquiries and disputes about infinity, prescience, liberty, necessity, and so forth, upon whose desperate and unconquerable theories, so many fine heads have been turned and crack'd,—never did my uncle Toby's the least injury at all; my father knew it,—and was no less surprised, than hewas