He did not understand that if he waited and listened and observed,
another idea of some kind would probably occur to him some day, and that
the development of this would in its turn suggest still further ones. He
did not yet know that the very worst way of getting hold of ideas is to
go hunting expressly after them. The way to get them is to study
something of which one is fond, and to note down whatever crosses one's
mind in reference to it, either during study or relaxation, in a little
note-book kept always in the waistcoat pocket. 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.
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