There is an old story and a good one to teach us how to fight against any weakness of the sort, which is this. Two old gentlemen who had never met before were in a first-class railway carriage of a train that does not stop until it gets to Bristol. They were talking about ghosts. One of them was a parson, the other was a layman. The layman said he did not believe in ghosts. The parson was very much annoyed, tried to convince him, and at last said, "After all, you'd have to believe in one if you saw one."
"No, I shouldn't," said the layman sturdily. "I should know it was an illusion."
Then the old parson got very angry indeed, and said in a voice shaking with self-restraint:
"Well, you've got to believe in ghosts now, for I am one!" Whereat he immediately vanished into the air.
The old layman, finding himself well rid of a bad business, shook himself together, wrapped his rug round his knees, and began to read his paper, for he knew very well that it was an illusion.
Of the same sturdy sense was Isaac Newton, when a lady came to him who had heard he was an astrologer, and asked him where she had dropped her purse, somewhere between Shooter's Hill and London Bridge. She would not believe that the Baronet (or knight, I forget which) could be ignorant of such things, and she came about fourteen times. So to be rid of her Newton, on the occasion of her last visit, put on an old flowered dressing-gown, and made himself a conical paper hat, and put on great blue goggles, and drew a circle on the floor, and said "Abracadabra!" "The front of Greenwich Hospital, the third great window from the southern end. On the grass just beneath it I see a short devil crouched upon a purse of gold." Off went the female, and sure enough under that window she found her purse. Whereat, instead of hearing the explanation (there was none) she thought it was an Omen.
Remember this parable. It is enormously illuminating.
This is written to dissuade all rich men from queering the pitch of us poor litteratoors, who have to write or starve. It is about a Mr. Foley: a Mr. Charles Foley, a banker and the son of a banker, who in middle life, that is at forty, saw no more use in coming to his office every day, but began to lead the life of a man of leisure. Next, being exceedingly rich he was prompted, of course, to write a book. The thing that prompted him to write a book was a thought, an idea. It took him suddenly as ideas will, one Saturday evening as he was walking home from his Club. It was a fine night and the idea seemed to come upon him out of the sky. This was the idea: that men produce such and such art in architecture and society and so forth, on account of the kind of climate they live in. Such a thought had never come to him before and very probably to no other man. It was simple like a seed--and yet, as he turned it over, what enormous possibilities.