O.M. It is a quite natural opinion—indeed an inevitable opinion—but _you _did not create the materials out of which it is formed. They are odds and ends of thoughts, impressions, feelings, gathered unconsciously from a thousand books, a thousand conversations, and from streams of thought and feeling which have flowed down into your heart and brain out of the hearts and brains of centuries of ancestors. _Personally_ you did not create even the smallest microscopic fragment of the materials out of which your opinion is made; and personally you cannot claim even the slender merit of _putting the borrowed materials together_. That was done _automatically_—by your mental machinery, in strict accordance with the law of that machinery’s construction. And you not only did not make that machinery yourself, but you have _not even any command over it_. Y.M. This is too much. You think I could have formed no opinion but that one? O.M. Spontaneously? No. And _you did not form that one_; your machinery did it for you—automatically and instantly, without reflection or the need of it. Y.M. Suppose I had reflected? How then? O.M. Suppose you try? Y.M. (_After a quarter of an hour_.) I have reflected. O.M. You mean you have tried to change your opinion—as an experiment? Y.M. Yes. O.M. With success? Y.M. No. It remains the same; it is impossible to change it. O.M. I am sorry, but you see, yourself, that your mind is merely a machine, nothing more. You have no command over it, it has no command over itself—it is worked _solely from the outside_. That is the law of its make; it is the law of all machines. Y.M. Can’t I _ever_ change one of these automatic opinions? O.M. No. You can’t yourself, but _exterior influences_ can do it. Y.M. And exterior ones _only_? O.M. Yes—exterior ones only. Y.M. That position is untenable—I may say ludicrously untenable. O.M. What makes you think so? Y.M. I don’t merely think it, I know it. Suppose I resolve to enter upon a course of thought, and study, and reading, with the deliberate purpose of changing that opinion; and suppose I succeed. _That _is not the work of an exterior impulse, the whole of it is mine and personal; for I originated the project. O.M. Not a shred of it. _It grew out of this talk with me_. But for that it would not have occurred to you. No man ever originates anything. All his thoughts, all his impulses, come _from the outside_. Y.M. It’s an exasperating subject. The _first_ man had original thoughts, anyway; there was nobody to draw from. O.M. It is a mistake. Adam’s thoughts came to him from the outside. _You_ have a fear of death. You did not invent that—you got it from outside, from talking and teaching. Adam had no fear of death—none in the world. Y.M. Yes, he had. O.M. When he was created? Y.M. No. O.M. When, then? Y.M. When he was threatened with it.