GROWTH AND DIFFUSION OF CRITICAL SPIRIT. 149 



marked, the introduction of a strict system is more 

 difficult. Criticism with its denned methods is there 

 limited almost entirely to the study and emendation of 

 manuscripts and texts and to interpretation of authors 

 and documents, i.e., to an introduction of those exercises 

 which form the groundwork in the older philological 

 seminaries. In the same degree as it has been 

 found necessary to extend the field of research 

 beyond the precincts of the universities, the rigid 

 application of critical methods has relaxed. In many 

 instances the work of specialists and practical experts, 

 of explorers and travellers, of untrained amateurs with 

 the assistance of large capital, has accumulated, at 

 random, such an enormous amount of new material, 

 usually out of the reach of the academic teacher, that 

 the process, as it were, of digestion, of critical arrange- 

 ment and sifting, has hardly begun. In the light of 

 these vast and overwhelming discoveries, the results of 

 earlier scholars and students who worked in a restricted 

 area with small means and scanty material appear 

 naturally insignificant and immature. Conclusions 

 which they drew with much confidence from narrow 

 premises and insufficient data have been disproved ; 

 whilst conjectures which at one time appeared fantastic 

 and were ridiculed by men of the school have un- 

 expectedly turned out to be true. All this has tended 

 to bring the critical methods, or what is now called 

 higher criticism, into some discredit, as a line of research 

 which has no finality, and succeeds only in matters 

 of detail ; or, where larger problems are at stake, only 

 by the aid of leading ideas and commanding points 



