"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.