Page:Carroll - Sylvie and Bruno Concluded.djvu/296

258 "Pray do," Arthur and I replied, almost in a breath. Lady Muriel put aside the heap of music, and folded her hands together.

"The one idea," the Earl resumed, "that has seemed to me to overshadow all the rest, is that of Eternityinvolving, as it seems to do, the necessary exhaustion of all subjects of human interest. Take Pure Mathematics, for instancea Science independent of our present surroundings. I have studied it, myself, a little. Take the subject of circles and ellipseswhat we call 'curves of the second degree.' In a future Life, it would only be a question of so many years (or hundreds of years, if you like), for a man to work out all their properties. Then he might go to curves of the third degree. Say that took ten times as long (you see we have unlimited time to deal with). I can hardly imagine his interest in the subject holding out even for those; and, though there is no limit to the degree of the curves he might study, yet surely the time, needed to exhaust all the novelty and interest of the subject, would be absolutely finite? And so of all other branches of Science. And,