THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
_ 
Or 
for) 
essentially trustworthy. This general acceptance of the essential 
trustworthiness of the record or portion being for a necessary 
reason or cause shown, all exceptions to the general acceptance, 
i.e., all rejections of single statements as incidentally erroneous, 
must be for a reason at least equally good; 2.e., such incidental 
rejections must be, like the general acceptance, for a necessary 
reason or cause shown. 
On the foregoing two grounds, the one based on the example and 
practive found in actual intercourse and experience, and the other on 
fundamental and established scientific principles, the correctness of the 
2d applicative principle is established as a necessary conclusion. By 
disregard of this principle, in fact, history, as a science, would become 
bankrupt, because if a scholar, having accepted a record as necessarily 
and essentially trustworthy, dare arbitrarily, 7.e., for a reason not of 
compelling force, stamp a single statement in it as erroneous, he dare 
do the same in succession to every single statement in the record; and 
the net result at the end of this proceeding would be that the same 
record which was accepted as necessarily and essentially trustworthy 
is also arbitrarily stamped and rejected as wholly erroneous. Such an 
impasse could be created on the strength of mere textual errors. The 
preservation of texts by copying is a correct scientific process, for apart 
from errors by the copyists, who in this case are the operators of the 
process, the results, 7.e., the copies made, must needs be correct; and if 
a text is in legible and intelligible condition, such text ipso facto accredits 
the copyists who made it as operators of this process; and this text, as 
the result of a correct process followed by accredited operators, must, 
according to the 4th fundamental principle, be accepted as correct save 
in those points where (by comparison with other texts) incidental error 
can be shown. In point of fact such incidental errors, some of them 
undiscovered and undiscoverable, yet not affecting in any way the 
essential value of the narrative, must exist even in the best of texts; 
and were it scientifically admissible to reject a statement in an essen- 
tially trustworthy record without necessary cause shown, a scholar 
might say concerning any statement in such a record which he wishes 
to reject, as indeed some do when they meet with a statement in an 
historical record which does not fit into a favorite hypothesis: “Here 

This is in harmony, too, with the Ist fundamental principle of science. Such 
a rejection is a decision to reject, 1.e., it is not a mere attitude of non-acceptance 
towards these particular statements, but a positive, definite determination or con- 
clusion to separate these statements from the general body of statements and to 
cast them forth as errors. Such a conclusion, like any other, must be, accord- 
ing to the Ist fundamental principle of science, for a necessary reason or cause 
shown. 
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