Ernest has come to know all about this now, but it took him
a long time to find it out, for this is not the kind of thing that
is taught at schools and universities.
Nor yet did he know that ideas, no less than the living beings in
whose minds they arise, must be begotten by parents not very unlike
themselves, the most original still differing but slightly from the
parents that have given rise to them. Life is like a fugue, everything
must grow out of the subject and there must be nothing new. Nor,
again, did he see how hard it is to say where one idea ends and
another begins, nor yet how closely this is paralleled in the
difficulty of saying where a life begins or ends, or an action or
indeed anything, there being an unity in spite of infinite
multitude, and an infinite multitude in spite of unity. He thought
that ideas came into clever people's heads by a kind of spontaneous
germination, without parentage in the thoughts of others or the course
of observation; for as yet he believed in genius, of which he well
knew that he had none, if it was the fine frenzied thing he thought it
was.
Not very long before this he had come of age, and Theobald had
handed him over his money, which amounted now to L5000; it was
invested to bring in 5 per cent and gave him therefore an income of
L250 a year.
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