tion, and there is no room for rectification. In the other case the selection is suggested by the result of a large generalisation about the documents, verified and checked by the immediate evidence belonging to the variation; and the generalisation itself rests on too broad a foundation of provisional judgements, at once confirming and correcting each other, to be materially weakened by the chance or probability that some few of them are individually unsound.
44. Nevertheless the use of Internal Evidence of Documents has uncertainties of its own, some of which can be removed or materially diminished by special care and patience in the second and third stages of the process, while others are inherent and cannot be touched without the aid of a fresh kind of evidence. They all arise from the fact that texts are, in one sense or another, not absolutely homogeneous. Internal knowledge of documents that are compared with each other should include all their chief characteristics, and these can only imperfectly be summed up under a broad statement of comparative excellence. At first sight the sole problem that presents itself is whether this document is ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than that; and this knowledge may sometimes suffice to produce a fair text, where the evidence itself is very simple. Yet it can never be satisfactory either to follow implicitly a document pronounced to be ‘best’, or to forsake it on the strength of internal evidence for this or that rival reading. Every document, it may be safely said, contains errors; and second only to the need of distinguishing good documents from bad is the need of leaving as little room as possible for caprice in distinguishing the occasional errors of ‘good’ documents from the sound parts of their text.
