more readily when they have talent, and to admit statements with less difficulty when they are presented in good literary form. Criticism must counteract this tendency by the application of the paradoxical rule, that the more interesting a statement is from the artistic point of view, the more it ought to be suspected. We must distrust every narrative which is very picturesque or very dramatic, in which the personages assume noble attitudes or manifest great intensity of feeling.
This first series of questions will yield the provisional result of enabling us to note the statements which have a chance of being mendacious.
V. The second series of questions will be of use in determining whether there is any reason to distrust the accuracy of a statement. Was the author in one of those situations which cause a man to make mistakes? As in dealing with good faith, we must look for these conditions both as affecting the document as a whole, and as affecting each of the particular statements in it.
The practice of the established sciences teaches us the conditions of an exact knowledge of facts. There is only one scientific procedure for gaining knowledge of a fact, namely, observation; every statement, therefore, must rest, directly or indirectly, upon an observation, and this observation must have been made correctly.
The set of questions by the aid of which we investigate the probabilities of error may be drawn up in the light of experience, which brings before us the most common cases of error.
(1) The author was in a situation to observe the fact, and supposed he really had observed it; he was, however, prevented from doing so by some interior force of which