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The heathen philosopher, when he had a mind to eat a grape, would open his lips when he put it into his mouth, meaning thereby that grapes were made to eat and lips to open. — As You Like It.
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At Venice, in the year ———, in the street ———, lived Pedro Garcia, a metaphysician. — With regard to date and residence, circumstances of a private and sacred nature forbid me to be more explicit. In all mental qualifications our hero was gigantic. Moreover, in bodily circumference, he had no cause of complaint; but, in right ascension, four feet five was the philosopher’s ne plus ultra.
Now Pedro was descended from a noble Florentine family; yet it was with little concern that, in certain boilings of the pot revolutionary, (during which, saith Machiavelli, the scum always comes uppermost) he beheld his large estates silently slipping through his fingers. Indeed, from his earliest youth, had Pedro Garcia been addicted to the most desperate abstrusities. He had studied at Padua, at Milan, at Gottingen. It is he — but let this go no farther — it is he to whom Kant is mainly indebted for his metaphysics. I have MSS. in my possession sufficient to establish what I say.
The doctrines of our friend were not very generally understood, although by no means difficult of comprehension. He was not, it is true, a Platonist — nor strictly an Aristotelian — nor did he, with Leibnitz, reconcile things irreconcileable [[irreconcilable]]. He was, emphatically, a Pedronist. He was Ionic and Italic. He reasoned a priori and a posteriori. His ideas were innate, or otherwise. He believed in George of Trebizond, he believed in Bossarion. Of his other propensities little is recorded. It is said that he preferred Catullus to Homer, and Sauterne to Medoc.