imposed by artistic form, and from all submission to the author's
ideas--an emancipation without which criticism is impossible.

The document thus analysed resolves into a long series of the author's
conceptions and statements as to facts.

With regard to each statement, we ask ourselves whether there is a
probability of their being false or erroneous, or whether, on the other
hand, there are exceptional chances in favour of good faith and
accuracy, working through the list of critical questions prepared for
particular cases. This list of questions must be always present to the
mind. At first it may seem cumbersome, perhaps pedantic; but as it will
be applied more than a hundred times in each page of the document, it
will in the end be used unconsciously. As we read a text, all the
reasons for distrust or confidence will occur to the mind
simultaneously, combined into a single impression.

Analysis and critical questioning will then have become a matter of
instinct, and we shall have acquired for ever that methodically
analytical, distrustful, not too respectful turn of mind which is often
mystically called "the critical sense," but which is nothing else than
an unconscious _habit_ of criticism.

CHAPTER VIII

THE DETERMINATION OF PARTICULAR FACTS

Critical analysis yields in the result a number of conceptions and
statements, accompanied by comments on the probability of the facts
stated being accurate. It remains to examine how we can deduce from
these materials those particular historical facts which are to form the
basis of scientific knowledge. Conceptions and statements are two
different kinds of results, and must be treated by different methods.

I. Every conception which is expressed in writing or by any illustrative
representation is in itself a definite, unimpeachable fact That which is
expressed must have first been present in the mind of some one--if not
in that of the author, who may have reproduced a formula he did not
understand, then in the mind of the man who originated the formula. The
existence of a conception may be learnt from a single instance and
proved from a single document. Analysis and interpretation are thus
sufficient for the purpose of drawing up the complete list of those
facts which form the basis of the history of the arts, the sciences, or
of doctrines.[167] It is the task of external criticism to localise
these facts by determining the epoch, the country, the author o