“The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.” Who said that?

Ralph Waldo Emerson? Oliver W. Holmes? Albert Einstein?

Until recently, I was sure that the author of this sentence was Albert Einstein. However, I was curious to read the original text. Was it written or just said? In which book? Newspaper? An article? Interview?

I found so many citations and some are “reliable” as universities, but I couldn’t reach a definitive conclusion. It seems to me that the author is Ralph Waldo Emerson.

It makes a lot of sense for the subject at hand, but some say it was Oliver W. Holmes his contemporary. Others say it was Einstein, but at the end of my research I couldn’t find the original source.

I confess that my research capacity in this field is limited. But, after much reflection, I think that every sentence or set of words is like a fruit of a plant. An “ideological fruit” that feeds on pre-existing ideas in the writer’s mind.

And “our” ideas, they’re not really ours, they’re like an accumulated set of other people’s thoughts. They expand through time and space just like the universe.

We don’t know exactly how and when it started, but it’s continually expanding and it doesn’t look like it’s going back to its initial state, if there’s an initial state at all.

In other words, any of them who had said has contributed to the expansion of an idea, just as I am.

Therefore, any Homo sapiens who had had the same experiences and consumed the same ideological fruits could formulate similar ideas. This could be an explanation for buildings such as pyramids to be found in civilizations that “never” had contact.

To say that one human civilization never had physical contact with another is possible, but ideologically and biologically I think we are directly linked to our first ancestors. Like the act of breastfeeding, babies are born knowing their needs.

So perhaps the original sentence could have been said by any of the three or another one. Maybe they had contact with the same initial idea and formulated the same hypothesis.

Or maybe this sentence is just an observation of a fact. For example, imagine that three people had seen a boy playing football. If I asked the observers separately what the boy was doing, most likely all three would say the same thing, that the boy was playing football.

Perhaps, a time traveler from before the creation of football could say that he saw a boy kicking an alien object. This reinforces thinking about the existence of a type of ideological fruit.

The observer is only able to answer that a boy was playing football if he knows what a boy is and what football is. “Boy” and “football”, in this case, are like nutrients from this mind plant that produces the phrase, that is, the fruit. And the content of this fruit is a whole universe where each meaning of a word opens up a new dimension.

So, back to the title, I don’t know who said that first. But maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it was just an observation that anyone would have before the same sources of information.

PS: Now I know after asking to google Bard.

It was written in an essay titled “The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table”, published in 1858.

The original quote says:
“Every now and then, a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.”