APPENDIX III 77
new surroundings and conditions. Are we, here also, to resort to multiplying the original character as occasion requires? Then again, those who resort to this device exhibit an amazing credulity in the acceptance of even fictions as facts. No doubt, the common man is credulous by nature and acts on the principle that unless a statement is proved false it must be accepted as true. But that can hardly be the scientific frame of mind. Unless and until a proposition is proved true it has no credentials for acceptance. If the strength of history lies in its critically-tested and carefully-ascertained facts, is not the historian under the necessity of rigorously testing his facts before he tries to raise any theoretic structure on them or seeks to explain them. For instance, while the existence of Rāvaṇa himself as a historical character is not above doubt, what conceivable purpose can it serve to create two or three Rāvaṇas? While all the recensions of the existing Rāmāyaṇa text is in classical Sanskrit, why should a Rāmāyaṇa in Vedic Sanskrit be hypostasized and another Vālmīki created to become the author of that hypothetical Rāmāyaṇa? Along with this exhibition of 'primitive credulity' on the part of some investigators there is also a tendency to exhibit undue veneration towards ancient tradition and literature and to expect from them more than what the life and characteristics of the possessors of such tradition and literature would warrant us to expect. If in actual life we come across impostors and other unscrupulous characters, why could they not intrude now and then into the world of letters also? Are there not instances of deli- berate forgeries committed in the name of well-known authors in the literary history of every country and at all times? Simply because a statement gets embodied in a literary work, does it become sacrosanct on that account? Should the critical method relax its rigour and go to sleep when that statement hails us from antiquity? On the other hand, the more an investigator recedes into the past the
