own.

All these restrictions may be summarised as follows: before drawing any
inference from a work of literature as to the state of the society in
which the author lived, we should ask ourselves what would be the worth
of a similar inference as to contemporary manners drawn from a modern
novel.

With the facts yielded by conceptions we may join those indifferent
facts of an obvious and elementary character which the author has
stated almost without thinking. Logically we have no right to call them
certain, for we do sometimes meet with men who make mistakes about
obvious and elementary facts, and others who lie even on indifferent
matters. But such cases are so rare that there is not much danger in
admitting as certain facts of this kind which are supported by a single
document, and this is how we deal, in practice, with periods of which
little is known. The institutions of the Gauls and Germans are described
from the unique texts of Caesar and Tacitus. Facts so easy to discover
are forced upon the authors of descriptions much as realities are forced
upon poets.

II. On the other hand, a statement in a document as to an objective fact
is never enough to establish that fact. The chances of falsehood or
error are so many, the conditions which gave rise to the statement are
so little known, that we cannot be sure that none of these chances has
taken effect. The critical examination provides no definitive solution;
it is indispensable if we are to avoid error, but it is insufficient to
conduct us to truth.

Criticism can _prove_ no fact; it only yields probabilities. Its end and
result is to decompose documents into statements, each labelled with an
estimate of its value--worthless statement, statement open to suspicion
(strong or weak), statement probably (or, very probably) true, statement
of unknown value.

Of all these different kinds of results one only is definitive--_the
statement of an author who can have had no information on the fact he
states is null and void_; it is to be rejected as we reject an
apocryphal document.[169] But criticism here merely destroys illusory
sources of information; it supplies nothing certain to take their place.
The only sure results of criticism are _negative_. All the positive
results are subject to doubt; they reduce to propositions of the form:
"There are chances for or against the truth of such and such a
statement." Chances only. A statement open to suspicion may turn out