Is it truly possible for an idea to be original? This is a common philosophical question pondered and asked very often. It can take people through bountiful branches of reasoning, and upon arriving at the leaves of these branches, they are sometimes left in confusion. The truth is, though, no idea can ever truly be original. Sure, people introduce new projects to society all the time, but the ideas themselves can never actually be initial. It’s simply not possible. 

Every fabric of thought that’s envisioned in the mind is woven up together of underlying concepts predating it, assembling what we call notions. These same concepts are built up by ideas before it. Those ideas are created in a similar fashion using ideas before them. This path can be carved out and traveled forever time and time again, but, during that journey, not a single original thought will be found because it will always need ancestors of reasoning and ideas of foundation to thread from. Without the latter, they couldn’t have possibly been formed. Take the TEM for example. Ernst Ruska, a Nobel-prize winning German physicist, is most often credited for the invention of the first of this type of microscope. People may say he was the one who initially created the idea, and they would be wrong. While he may have been the first to think of the idea, it’s still not of the original variety. Ruska had to combine the framework for earlier microscopes along with his knowledge on wavelengths and many other aspects of already known physics to create the device. Therefore, it’s not original at all. Instead, it’s a fusion of concoctions of different concepts put together to make a revolutionary device no known person has built before on record. 

Even then, if there’s an argument to be made against the reasoning presented here, and, if there’s still a possibility that an actual concept can be thought of which not a single other person has had come to their mind before, the idea still wouldn’t actually be original. Here’s why. There are infinitely many ideas, but those ideas already exist. They just haven’t been discovered yet. They haven’t been thought of yet. When someone writes a verse of poetry, they didn’t actually make the notion behind the poetry. They put together earlier concepts to craft a piece of art which no other recorded human has ever thought of before. But the idea was always there just waiting to be discovered. Just like when a mycologist discovers a new species of mushrooms, no one says they created the fungi. Instead, the person goes down in history as having discovered the organism.

So a truly original idea would be one that can never exist in the universe. This, in turn, can never be thought of by the human mind. A good way to imagine this is to think of ideas as colors. Forging an unique idea would be like trying to generate a whole new color completely separate from the shades known today. It’s not possible. But by combining different pigments, one can assemble a tone which is new to the eyes of humans. Like the mystical, nonexistent color, an original speculation simply cannot exist and, in the end, is an illusion. It’s just another idea fabricated by the human mind.