crasis

Updated: May 12, 2025

This is all that ever staggered my faith in regard to Yorick's extraction, who, by what I can remember of him, and by all the accounts I could ever get of him, seemed not to have had one single drop of Danish blood in his whole crasis; in nine hundred years, it might possibly have all run out: I will not philosophize one moment with you about it; for happen how it would, the fact was this: That instead of that cold phlegm and exact regularity of sense and humours, you would have looked for, in one so extracted; he was, on the contrary, as mercurial and sublimated a composition, as heteroclite a creature in all his declensions; with as much life and whim, and gaite de coeur about him, as the kindliest climate could have engendered and put together.

Laurence Sterne - The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman