of documents. For such writings in fact it can be employed as the primary guide only where the better documents are in tolerably complete agreement against the worse; and the insufficiency must increase with their number and diversity. Wherever the better documents are ranged on different sides, the decision becomes virtually dependent on the uncertainties of isolated personal judgements. here is evidently no way through the chaos of complex attestation which thus confronts us except by going back to its causes, that is, by enquiring what antecedent circumstances of transmission will account for such combinations of agreements and differences between the several documents as we find actually existing. In other words, we are led to the necessity of investigating not only individual documents and their characteristics, but yet more the mutual relations of documents,
SECTION III. GENEALOGICAL EVIDENCE
49—76
A. 49—53. Simple or divergent genealogy
49. The first great step in rising above the uncertainties of Internal Evidence of Readings was taken by ceasing to treat Readings independently of each other, and examining them connectedly in series, each series being furnished by one of the several Documents in which they are found. The second great step, at which we have now arrived, consists in ceasing to treat Documents independently of each other, and examining them connectedly as parts of a single whole in virtue of their historical relationships. In their prima facie character documents present themselves as so many independent and rival texts of greater or less purity. But as a matter of fact they are not independent: by the nature of the
