Note 297 — Chapter X · (continued 2)

"Sir John Cutler had a pair of black worsted stockings, which his maid darned so often with silk that they became at last a pair of silk stockings. Now, supposing these stockings of Sir John's endued with some degree of consciousness at every particular darning, they would have been sensible that they were the same individual pair of stockings both before and after the darning; and this sensation would have continued in them through all the succession of darnings; and yet after the last of all, there was not perhaps one thread left of the first pair of stockings: but they were grown to be silk stockings, as was said before." (Pope's Martinus Scriblerus, quoted by Brown, ibid.)