APPLIED TO HISTORY 237 



my mental equilibrium. I am very glad there was no 

 colliery disaster : the report of it must have been like the 

 report of the massacre at Pekin some years ago, which 

 turned out false. I reconcile myself to the idea of the 

 king being still out of town : to a different view of 

 the division in the House of Commons. And this also 

 occurs without much searching of heart, and without any 

 attempts at verification. 



Why is this ? It seems to me to depend mainly on the 

 fact that all these events belong, so to say, to the natural 

 context of my experience. All lie outside the limits of 

 any direct observation on my part, but they are all things 

 which I am aware may happen : the possibility of them 

 is, so to speak, a suppressed or unconscious presumption 

 in my mind : it requires little more than an assertion, 

 in one of the regular channels of current history, for 

 me to accept the statement : and the denial is scarcely 

 more difficult. Though these things are easy to accept, 

 there is no reason why they should have happened, and 

 rumours are not invariably true. They do not exactly 

 require verification or elaborate criticism, because the 

 experience to which they belong, in its wider aspect, is a 

 perpetual process of criticism and verification in itself. 

 In short, statement and denial are equally easy to accept, 

 because either will fall readily into the context of my 

 ordinary experience. In one sense, I can never prove any 

 of the statements : that is, I can never avoid the fact that 

 I depend for my knowledge of them upon the knowledge 

 and veracity of others. But, knowing the way things [/ 

 mostly go in England, I know that I can fairly trust the 

 news in the daily papers. 



This, however, is not quite all that should be said. 

 To resign with so little compunction a statement accepted 

 without any criticism implies a somewhat low form of 



