of the facts;[148] they give us no
information about anything but the imagination of the author when he is
sincere, or his impudence when he is the reverse. We are apt to say of a
circumstantial narrative: "Things of this kind are not invented." They
are not invented, but they are very easy to transfer from one person,
country, or time to another. There is thus no external characteristic of
a document which can relieve us of the obligation to criticise it.

The value of an author's statement depends solely on the conditions
under which he performed certain mental operations. Criticism has no
other resource than the examination of these conditions. But it is not
a case of reconstructing all of them; it is enough to answer a single
question: did the author perform these operations correctly or not? The
question may be approached on two sides.

(1) The critical investigation of authorship has often taught us the
_general_ conditions under which the author operated. It is probable
that some of these influenced each one of the operations. We ought
therefore to begin by studying the information we possess about the
author and the composition of the document, taking particular pains to
look in the habits, sentiments, and personal situation of the author, or
in the circumstances in which he composed, for all the reasons which
could have existed for incorrectness on the one hand, or exceptional
accuracy on the other. In order to perceive these reasons it is
necessary to be on the lookout for them beforehand. The only method,
therefore, is to draw up a general set of questions having reference to
the possible causes of inaccuracy. We shall then apply it to the general
conditions under which the document was composed, in order to discover
those causes which may have rendered the author's mental operations
incorrect and vitiated the results. But all that we shall thus
obtain--even in the exceptionally favourable cases in which the
conditions of origin are well known--will be _general_ indications,
which will be insufficient for the purposes of criticism, for criticism
must always deal with each separate statement.

(2) The criticism of particular statements is confined to the use of a
single method, which, by a curious paradox, is the study of the
_universal_ conditions under which documents are composed. The
information which is not furnished by the general study of the author
may be sought for by a consideration of the necessa