in the general case, lead an author to violate truth. The following are the most important cases:—
(1) The author seeks to gain a practical advantage for himself; he wishes to deceive the reader of the document, in order to persuade him to an action, or to dissuade him from it; he knowingly gives false information: we then say the author has an interest in deceiving. This is the case with most official documents. Even in documents which have not been composed for a practical purpose, every interested statement has a chance of being mendacious. In order to determine which statements are to be suspected, we are to ask what can have been the general aim of the author in writing the document as a whole; and again, what can have been his particular purpose in making each of the separate statements which compose the document. But there are two natural tendencies to be resisted. The first is, to ask what interest the author could have had in lying, meaning what interest should we have had in his place; we must ask instead what interest can he have thought he had in lying, and we must look for the answer in his tastes and ideals. The other tendency is to take sole account of the individual interest of the author; we ought, however, to remember that the author may have given false information in order to serve a collective interest. This is one of the difficulties of criticism. An author is a member at one and the same time of several different groups, a family, a province, a country, a religious denomination, a political party, a class in society, whose interests often conflict; we have to discover