ubtilise on them till they make them doubtful, under the pretext of
freeing them from imaginary corruptions. They discover traces of forgery
in authentic documents. A strange state of mind! By constantly guarding
against the instinct of credulity they come to suspect everything.[121]
It is to be observed that in proportion as the criticism of texts and
sources makes positive progress, the danger of hypercriticism increases.
When all the sources of history have been properly criticised (for
certain parts of ancient history this is no distant prospect), good
sense will call a halt. But scholars will refuse to halt; they will
refine, as they do already on the best established texts, and those who
refine will inevitably fall into hypercriticism. "The peculiarity of the
study of history and its auxiliary philological sciences," says Renan,
"is that as soon as they have attained their relative perfection they
begin to destroy themselves."[122] Hypercriticism is the cause of this.

_Dilettantism._--Scholars by profession and vocation have a tendency to
treat the external criticism of documents as a game of skill, difficult,
but deriving an interest, much as chess does, from the very complication
of its rules. Some of them are indifferent to the larger questions--to
history itself, in fact. They criticise for the sake of criticism, and,
in their view, the elegance of the method of investigation is much more
important than the results, whatever they may be. These _virtuosi_ are
not concerned to connect their labours with some general idea--to
criticise systematically, for example, all the documents relating to a
question, in order to understand it; they criticise indiscriminately
texts relating to all manner of subjects, on the one condition of being
sufficiently corrupt. Armed with their critical skill, they range over
the whole of the domain of history, and stop wherever a knotty problem
invites their services; this problem solved, or at least discussed, they
go elsewhere to look for others. They leave behind them no coherent
work, but a heterogeneous collection of memoirs on every conceivable
subject, which resembles, as Carlyle says, a curiosity shop or an
archipelago of small islands.

Dilettanti defend their dilettantism by sufficiently plausible
arguments. To begin with, say they, everything is important; in history
there is no document which has not its value: "No scientific work is
barren, no truth is without its use fo