little
things."[118] In the same year the same note was sounded, at the
University of Bale, by Herr J. v. Pflugk-Harttung. "The highest branches
of historical science are despised," says this author in his
_Geschichtsbetrachtungen_[119]: "all that is valued is microscopic
observations and absolute accuracy in unimportant details. The criticism
of texts and sources has become a branch of sport: the least breach of
the rules of the game is considered unpardonable, while conformity to
them is enough to assure the approval of connoisseurs, irrespectively of
the intrinsic value of the results obtained. Scholars are mostly
malevolent and discourteous towards each other; they make molehills and
call them mountains; their vanity is as comic as that of the citizen of
Frankfort who used complacently to observe, 'All that you can see
through yonder archway is Frankfort territory.'"[120] We, for our part,
are inclined to draw a distinction between three professional risks to
which scholars are subject: dilettantism, hypercriticism, and loss of
the power to work.

To take the last first: the habit of critical analysis has a relaxing
and paralysing action on certain intelligences. Men, of naturally timid
dispositions, discover that whatever pains they take with their critical
work, their editing or classifying of documents, they are very apt to
make slight mistakes, and these slight mistakes, as a result of their
critical education, fill them with horror and dread. To discover
blunders in their signed work when the time for correction is past,
causes them acute suffering. They reach at length a state of morbid
anxiety and scrupulosity which prevents them from doing anything at
all, for fear of possible imperfections. The _examen rigorosum_ to which
they are continually subjecting themselves brings them to a standstill.
They give the same measure to the productions of others, and in the end
they see in historical works nothing but the authorities and the notes,
the _apparatus criticus_, and in the _apparatus criticus_ they see
nothing but the faults in it which require correction.

_Hypercriticism._--The excess of criticism, just as much as the crudest
ignorance, leads to error. It consists in the application of critical
canons to cases outside their jurisdiction. It is related to criticism
as logic-chopping is to logic. There are persons who scent enigmas
everywhere, even where there are none. They take perfectly clear texts
and s