Innocenceat home, Redding, Connecticut,
Aug. 15, ’08. 
Dear sir,—­I highly prize the pipes, and shall intimate to people that “Raleigh” smoked them, and doubtless he did.  After a little practice I shall be able to go further and say he did; they will then be the most interesting features of my library’s decorations.  The Horse-shoe is attracting a good deal of attention, because I have intimated that the conqueror’s horse cast it; it will attract more when I get my hand in and say he cast it, I thank you for the pipes and the shoe; and also for the official guide, which I read through at a single sitting.  If a person should say that about a book of mine I should regard it as good evidence of the book’s interest. 
Very truly yours,
S. L. Clemens.

In his philosophy, What Is Man?, and now and again in his other writings, we find Mark Twain giving small credit to the human mind as an originator of ideas.  The most original writer of his time, he took no credit for pure invention and allowed none to others.  The mind, he declared, adapted, consciously or unconsciously; it did not create.  In a letter which follows he elucidates this doctrine.  The reference in it to the “captain” and to the kerosene, as the reader may remember, have to do with Captain “Hurricane” Jones and his theory of the miracles of “Isaac and of the prophets of Baal,” as expounded in Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion.

     By a trick of memory Clemens gives The Little Duke as his suggestion
     for The Prince and the Pauper; he should have written The Prince and
     the Page, by the same author.

To Rev. F. Y. Christ, in New York: 

Redding, Conn., Aug., ’08.  Dear sir,—­You say “I often owe my best sermons to a suggestion received in reading or from other exterior sources.”  Your remark is not quite in accordance with the facts.  We must change it to—­“I owe all my thoughts, sermons and ideas to suggestions received from sources outside of myself.”  The simplified English of this proposition is—­“No man’s brains ever originated an idea.”  It is an astonishing thing that after all these ages the world goes on thinking the human brain machinery can originate a thought.

It can’t.  It never has done it.  In all cases, little and big, the thought is born of a suggestion; and in all cases the suggestions come to the brain from the outside.  The brain never acts except from exterior impulse.

A man can satisfy himself of the truth of this by a single process,—­let him examine every idea that occurs to him in an hour; a day; in a week —­in a lifetime if he please.  He will always find that an outside something suggested the thought, something which he saw with his eyes or heard with his ears or perceived by his touch—­not necessarily to-day, nor yesterday, nor last year, nor twenty years ago, but sometime or other.  Usually the source of the suggestion is immediately traceable, but sometimes it isn’t.