must make
up his mind to work for distant and uncertain results, and, in nearly
every case, for the benefit of others. For textual criticism and the
investigation of sources, it is, moreover, very useful to have the
puzzle-solving instinct--that is, a nimble, ingenious mind, fertile in
hypotheses, prompt to seize and even to guess the relations of things.
For tasks of description and compilation (the preparation of inventories
and catalogues, _corpus_ and _regesta_-making) it is absolutely
necessary to possess the collector's instinct, together with an
exceptional appetite for work, and the qualities of order, industry, and
perseverance.[116] These are the aptitudes required. The labours of
external criticism are so distasteful to those who lack these aptitudes,
and the results obtained are, in their case, so small in comparison with
the time expended, that it is impossible for a man to make too sure of
his vocation before entering upon a career of critical scholarship. It
is pitiful to see those who, for want of a wise word spoken in due
season, lose their way and vainly exhaust themselves in such a career,
especially when they have good reason for believing that they might have
employed their talents to better advantage in other directions.[117]

II. As critical and preparatory tasks are remarkably well suited to the
temperament of a very large number of Germans, and as the activity of
German erudition during the present century has been enormous, it is to
Germany that we must go for the best cases of those mental deformations
which are produced, in the long run, by the habitual practice of
external criticism. Hardly a year passes but complaints are heard, in
and about the German universities, of the ill effects produced on
scholars by the tasks of criticism.

In 1890, Herr Philippi, as Rector of the University of Giessen, forcibly
deplored the chasm which, as he said, is opening between preparatory
criticism and general culture: textual criticism loses itself in
insignificant minutiae; scholars collate for the mere pleasure of
collating; infinite precautions are employed in the restoration of
worthless documents; it is thus evident that "more importance is
attached to the materials of study than to its intellectual results."
The Rector of Giessen sees in the diffuse style of German scholars and
in the bitterness of their polemical writings an effect of the habit
they have contracted of "excessive preoccupation with