stand some part or some aspect of it, which they take for the whole; and hence, in judging variations of text, they are led unawares to disparage any word or phrase which owes its selection by the author to those elements of the thought present to his mind which they have failed to perceive or to feel.
B. 28—37. Transcriptional Probability
28. The next step in criticism is the discovery of Transcriptional Probability, and is suggested by the reflexion that what attracts ourselves is not on the average unlikely to have attracted transcribers. If one various reading appears to ourselves to give much better sense or in some other way to excel another, the same apparent superiority may have led to the introduction of the reading in the first instance. Mere blunders apart, no motive can be thought of which could lead a scribe to introduce consciously a worse reading in place of a better. We might thus seem to be landed in the paradoxical result that intrinsic inferiority is evidence of originality.
29. In reality however, although this is the form in which the considerations that make up Transcriptional Probability are likely in the first instance to present themselves to a student feeling his way onwards beyond Intrinsic Probability, the true nature of Transcriptional Probability can hardly be understood till it is approached from another side. Transcriptional Probability is not directly or properly concerned with the relative excellence of rival readings, but merely with the relative fitness of each for explaining the existence of the others. Every rival reading contributes an element to
