Page:Diary of a Pilgrimage (1891).pdf/293

 of fiction. There is no originality in them whatever. Human thought is incapable of originality. No man ever yet imagined a new thing-only some variation or extension of an old thing.

The sailor, when he was asked what he would do with a fortune, promptly replied:

"Buy all the rum and 'baccy there is in the world."

"And what after that?" they asked him.

"Eh?"

"What would you buy after that—after you had bought up all the rum and tobacco there was in the world?—what would you buy then?"

"After that? Oh! 'um!" (a long pause). "Oh!"

(with inspiration) "why, more 'baccy!"

Rum and tobacco he knew something of, and could therefore imagine about. He did not know any other luxuries, therefore he could not conceive of any others.

So if you asked one of these Utopian-dreaming gentry what, after they had secured for their world all the electricity there was in the Universe, and after every mortal. thing in their ideal Paradise was done and said and thought by electricity, they could imagine as further necessary to human happiness, they would probably muse for a while, and then reply "More electricity."

They know electricity. They have seen the electric light, and heard of electric boats and omnibuses. They have possibly had an electric shock at a railway station for a penny.

Therefore, knowing that electricity does three things, they can go on and "imagine" electricity doing three hundred things, and the very great ones among them can imagine it doing three thousand things; but for them, or anybody else, to imagine a new force, totally