n number of
arrangements. Conceive the effect when all these capabilities shall be
exhausted! It will no longer be possible for a new thing to be said or
written. We shall have only to select and repeat from the past. Writing
shall be reduced to the making of extracts, and speaking to the making
of quotations. Yet the condition of things would certainly be improved.
As there is now a great deal of writing without thinking, so then
thinking could go on without writing. A man would be obliged to think
out and up to his result, as we do now; but whether his processes and
conclusions were wise or foolish, he would find them written out for him
in advance. The process of selection would be all. The immense amount of
writing would cease. Authors would be extinct. Thinkers could find their
ideas stated in the best possible way, and the most effective arguments
in their favor. If this event seems at all unlikely to any one, let him
only reflect on the long geological ages, and on the innumerable
writings, short and long, now published daily,--from Mr. Buckle to the
newspapers. Estimate everything in type daily throughout Christendom. If
so much is done in a day, how much in a few decades of centuries?
Surely, at our present rate, in a very conceivable length of time, the
resources of two alphabets would be exhausted. And this may be the
reason and providence in the amount of writing now going on,--to get
human language written up. The earth is as yet not half explored, and
its cultivation and development, in comparison with what shall some time
be, have scarcely begun. Will not the race be blessed, when its two
mortal foes, Nature and the alphabet, have been finally and forever
subdued?

This necessary finiteness of literature may be illustrated in another
way. An English mathematician of the seventeenth century applied the
resources of his art to an enumeration of human ideas. He believed that
he could calculate with rigorous exactness the number of ideas of which
the human mind is susceptible. This number, according to him, (and he
has never been disputed,) was 3,155,760,000. Even if we allowed
a million of words to one idea, according to our present
practice,--instead of a single word to an idea, which would seem
reasonable,--still, all the possible combinations of words and ideas
would finally be exhausted. The ideas would give out, to be sure, a
million of times before the words; but the latter would meet their doom
at la