there will be too much
electricity. They will grow to loathe electricity.

Electricity is going to light them, warm them, carry them, doctor them,
cook for them, execute them, if necessary. They are going to be weaned
on electricity, rocked in their cradles by electricity, slapped by
electricity, ruled and regulated and guided by electricity, buried by
electricity. I may be wrong, but I rather think they are going to be
hatched by electricity.

In the new world of our progressionist teachers, it is electricity that
is the real motive-power. The men and women are only marionettes--worked
by electricity.

But it was not to speak of the electricity in them, but of the
originality in them, that I referred to these works 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 ask 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 awhile, 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 unconnected
with and different from anything yet known in nature, would be utterly
impossible.

Human thought is not a firework, ever shooting off fresh fo