PRINCIPLES OF THE CRITICISM OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 245 



a serious caution against the assumed security of the position of the 

 Higher Critics. In dealing with the 'position of the Higher Criticism 

 the paper left little more to be said in the present state of our 

 knowledge, but the speaker desired to offer a few critical remarks 

 on the principles from the point of view of a student of Science. 

 The " assured results " of the critics were often assured only by 

 a certain consensus of opinion among a certain set of scholars. But 

 scholarship can be, and often is, unscientific. In the last resort it 

 turns often upon negative evidence, and involves the fallacy of 

 measuring what may be by what the learned know or think that 

 they know. The method is unscientific, because it proceeds merely 

 by deductive reasoning from certain accepted conclusions. Geometry 

 is a deductive science (as John Stuart Mill pointed out years ago), 

 but its deductions are based on axioms which are truths attested by 

 universal experience. The logical vice of the Higher Criticism 

 consists in assuming that certain generalizations have the value of 

 truths universal ; and, what is worse, the critics often fail to perceive 

 that, while their " assumed results are based on such assumptions, 

 derived to a large extent from negative reasoning, the advance of 

 knowledge, from the sidelights of such sciences as archaeology and 

 anthropology, is constantly smashing such empirically constructed 

 theories by the solid logic of facts newly brought to light. 



In science, real workers have learned to be cautious in basing 

 conclusions on such empirical generalizations, for example, as Lyell's 

 Uniformitarian dogma in geology. Increased light thrown upon 

 the infinitely complex operation of natural law, with the advance 

 of scientific discovery, leads to the result that old working-hypotheses 

 are frequently breaking down, as inadequate to the enlarged intel- 

 lectual perspective of the serious student. The pity is that the 

 lack of such a spirit of willingness to unlearn in the light of fuller 

 knowledge, and the lack too often of a spirit of reverence in the 

 intellectual attitude towards those things which, in the spiritual 

 sphere, have come to us attested by the traditional experience of 

 a hundred generations of mankind, as they cluster round the feet 

 of the God-Man, can so warp the judgment as to bring the critic some- 

 times perilously near sinning against intellectual veracity, when in the 

 face of new evidence, he refuses to see the necessity for reconsidering 

 his " assured results " in the light of the bare logic of facts. How 

 some of these " assured results " fare when a more scientific spirit 



