It has been already pointed out that there are but two kinds of evidence to which we can appeal in prosecuting the work of criticising a text,—external and internal evidence. All methods of criticism are, therefore, but various ways of using these kinds of evidence; and when we undertake to investigate the methods of criticism, we simply inquire how we are to proceed in order to reach firm conclusions as to the text by means of internal and external evidence. We have been busied thus far in merely gathering the external testimony, and the reader is doubtless in a position to appreciate how little the mere collection of the testimony has advanced us in deciding on the text. It is our business now to consider how we may attain a grounded decision as to the true text.
1. Internal Evidence of Readings.
The most rudimentary method of dealing with the variations that emerge in the collection of the external testimony would be to use the external evidence only to advertise to us the fact of variation and to furnish us with the readings between which choice is to be made, and then to settle the claims of the rival readings on internal grounds. Most crudely performed, this would be to select, out of the readings actually transmitted, that one which seemed to us to make the best sense in the connection, or to account most easily for the origin of the others. It requires no argument to point out the illegitimacy of thus setting aside the external evidence unheard; or the danger of thus staking everything upon our insight into the exact intention of the author or the springs of action that moved men through a millennium and a half of copying, if this insight be exercised extemporaneously, as it were, and without a very severe previous study of the authors and their times and the scribes and their habits. Nevertheless, though all may not be lightly ventured upon its untrained dictum, internal evidence of readings, when carefully investigated, constitutes a most valuable method of criticism, the aid of which we cannot dispense with. It will repay us, therefore, to consider its methods of procedure in some detail.
As has been already intimated, “internal evidence of readings” includes two separate and independent processes. In interrogating any reading as to the evidence that it bears to its own originality, we may make our inquiries with reference to the author, or with reference to the scribes who have transmitted what he wrote; and we may make them in either case absolutely, or relatively to other transmitted readings. We may ask, absolutely, What is the probability that this is the reading that the author would have placed just here? or, relatively, What probability commends this reading, above any of the others that have come down to us, as the reading which the author wrote here? Or we may ask what is the probability that this is the reading which the scribes began with, either absolutely—i.e., in the form, Does this reading suggest an earlier one, out of which it was made by the scribes? or relatively to the other transmitted readings—that is, in the form, What is the probability that the other readings have grown out of this one? When dealing absolutely with each reading, we are seeking directly the autographic text. When dealing relatively with each, we are seeking in the first instance only the earliest transmitted text, and leaving it to a further inquiry to determine whether or not this is the autographic text. In either case we are making use of two separate methods of inquiry; one of which deals with the probability that the author wrote this reading, and the other with the probability that the scribes began with it. The one is appropriately called Intrinsic Evidence, and the other Transcriptional Evidence.
Intrinsic Evidence.
By intrinsic evidence is meant the testimony which each reading delivers, by its very nature, to its fitness to stand in the text. It is elicited by actually trying the reading in question in the passage and testing its appropriateness by the contextual argument, the rhetorical flow of the language, the known style and habits of speech and thought of the author, and the general language and thought-circle of the times and society in which he lived. The danger that attends the use of the method grows out of our tendency to read our own standpoint into our author, instead of reading ourselves back into his. It is easy to become an improver instead of remaining a simple editor; and it is often very difficult not to make an author speak our thoughts, if not even our language. It cannot, however, be too strongly insisted upon that any attempt to estimate intrinsic probabilities by the rule of what appears to us to be the best reading is simply an attempt to corrupt the text and train it to festoon the trellises of our own desires. All trustworthy appeal to intrinsic evidence is a delicate historical process by which the critic, having steeped himself in the times of the writer and having assimilated himself to his thought and style, thinks his thoughts and estimates the value and fitness of words with his scales. The reading which would be intrinsically certain in Mr. Carlyle might be intrinsically ridiculous in Mr. Ruskin. The reading that we should commend in Lucian might be unthinkable in Epictetus; that which would be appropriate in Lucretius might be impossible in John. The preparation for a just use of this method of criticism consists, therefore, in a serious and sympathetic study of the author in hand: and without this, all appeal to it is but opening the floodgates to the most abounding error.