which he accepts as the reading intended by the author, and yet which he does not believe to have been received by continuous transmission from the autograph.
89. We have dwelt at some length on these two classes of variations because at first sight they appear to furnish grounds for distrusting the supremacy of what we have ventured to call the higher kinds of evidence. They not unnaturally suggest the thought that, whatever may be said in theory respecting the trustworthiness of evidence not Intrinsic, it breaks down in extreme cases, and must therefore contain some latent flaw which weakens its force in all. But the suspicion loses all plausibility when it is seen that it springs from a confusion as to the subject matter of attestation (see § 87), and that the attestation itself remains as secure in extreme cases as in all others. The actual uncertainties arise not from any want of cogency of method, but from inadequate quantity or quality of the concrete evidence available in this or that particular text or variation.
90. Both the classes of variations just considered imply corruption in the earliest transmitted text. The same fact of corruption antecedent to extant documentary evidence has to be recognised in other cases, some of which form a third class of variations. Besides the variations already noticed in which the evidence shews one variant to have been the parent of the rest, while yet on Intrinsic grounds it cannot be right, there are others in which the variants have every appearance of being independent of each other, while yet on Intrinsic grounds none having sufficiently good documentary attestation, or even none at all, can be regarded as right: that is to say, a convergence of phenomena points to some lost reading as the common origin of the existing readings. Fourthly, there may be sufficient grounds for inability to accept the transmitted text even in places where the documents agree.
91. In all four cases the ground of belief that the transmitted text is wrong is Internal Evidence of Readings. In the third it is or may be a combination of Intrinsic and Transcriptional Evidence: in the first, second, and fourth it is exclusively Intrinsic Evidence, except where recognition of corruption is partly founded on perception of the lost original reading, which, as we shall see shortly, involves the use of Transcriptional Evidence. The use of Internal Evidence of Readings in detecting corruption is precisely identical with its use, or