mature its power. All instinctive processes of criticism which deserve confidence are rooted in experience, and that an experience which has undergone perpetual correction and recorrection.
SECTION VI. CRITICISM AS DEALING WITH ERRORS ANTECEDENT TO EXISTING TEXTS
85—95
A. 85—92. Primitive errors
85. The preceding pages have dealt exclusively with the task of discriminating between existing various readings, one variant in each case being adopted and the rest discarded. The utmost result that can be obtained under this condition is the discovery of what is relatively original: whether the readings thus relatively original were also the readings of the autograph is another question, which can never be answered in the affirmative with absolute decision except where the autograph itself is extant, but which admits of approximative answers varying enormously in certainty according to the nature of the documentary evidence for the text generally. Even in a case in which it were possible to shew that the extant documents can be traced back to two originals which diverged from the autograph itself without any intermediate common ancestor, we could never be quite sure that where they differed one or other must have the true reading, since they might independently introduce different changes in the same place, say owing to some obscurity in the writing of a particular word. In almost all actual cases an interval, short or long, must have divided the autograph from the earliest point or points to which genealogy conducts us back; and any interval implies the possibility of corruption, while every addition to the length of the interval increases the probability of corruption. On the other hand documentary evidence including a fair variety of very ancient attestation may bring the meeting-point of the extant lines of transmission so near the autograph that freedom from antecedent corruption ceases to be improbable, without however thereby becoming a priori probable. In such cases therefore any investigation of
