However, if you will examine every thought that occurs to you for the
next two days, you will find that in at least nine cases out of ten you
can put your finger on the outside suggestion--And that ought to convince
you that No. 10 had that source too, although you cannot at present hunt
it down and find it.

The idea of writing to me would have had to wait a long time if it waited
until your brain originated it. It was born of an outside suggestion
--Sir Thomas and my old Captain.

The hypnotist thinks he has invented a new thing--suggestion. This is
very sad. I don't know where my captain got his kerosene idea. (It was
forty-one years ago, and he is long ago dead.) But I know that it didn't
originate in his head, but it was born from a suggestion from the
outside.

Yesterday a guest said, "How did you come to think of writing 'The Prince
and the Pauper?'" I didn't. The thought came to me from the outside
--suggested by that pleasant and picturesque little history-book, Charlotte
M. Yonge's "Little Duke," I doubt if Mrs. Burnett knows whence came to
her the suggestion to write "Little Lord Fauntleroy," but I know; it came
to her from reading "The Prince and the Pauper." In all my life I have
never originated an idea, and neither has she, nor anybody else.

Man's mind is a clever machine, and can work up materials into ingenious
fancies and ideas, but it can't create the material; none but the gods
can do that. In Sweden I saw a vast machine receive a block of wood, and
turn it into marketable matches in two minutes. It could do everything
but make the wood. That is the kind of machine the human mind is. Maybe
this is not a large compliment, but it is all I can afford.....