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PEOF. H. EDODARD NAVILLE, D.C.L., LL.V., OX 



explain the Egyptian meaning completely, but it is evidently 

 Egyptian, and we are expressly told so. The names given to Eve 

 and to Cain, on the other hand, are Hebrew, and the author has no 

 occasion to tell us of the fact : he gives their interpretation. 



I cannot conceive any valid answer to this argument. We have 

 two Aramaic versions, and the significance of most of these proper 

 names is lost in both of them, as it is in the other versions. But in 

 Hebrew the meanings are precise. 



With regard to the general tendency of the theory of the com- 

 posite origin of Genesis, the essay has put it very clearly before us 

 that the higher critical theory which assigns the book to seven 

 different authors is a reductio ad dbsurdum. It seems to me scarcely 

 possible to make any such separation of sources unless we have 

 the original sources preserved to us. Some critics tell us that 

 there is inconsistency between the first and second chapters of 

 Genesis, and therefore that the two chapters should be assigned to 

 two different authors. But in Kant's Critique of Pare Reason, 

 the first and second chapters contradict each other directly, yet 

 they were by the same author. Xow an argument must hold 

 always, or it does not hold at all. May I give an example, drawn 

 from my own experience, indicating the uncertainty which attaches 

 to a priori argument of the kind employed 1 Perhaps I may be the 

 more readily permitted to give it as it tells against myself. I was 

 writing the lives of certain English Orientalists, for the Dictionary of 

 National Biography, and among them that of Dr. Joseph White, 

 my predecessor at Oxford. He had been called upon to give the 

 Bampton Lectures, and, being much pressed for time, he obtained 

 the assistance of a collaborator, the Eev. C. Badcock. Some, there- 

 fore, of the Lectures were by one author, and the others by another. 

 The subject of the series was Mahommedanism and Christianity. In 

 attempting to discriminate between the authors of the different 

 Lectures, I assigned Lecture V to Professor White : it was on the 

 Lives of Mahommed and Christ, and I thought that only an Orient- 

 alist such as he had the technical knowledge which that Lecture 

 displayed. I also assigned the first Lecture to him, as I thought he 

 would have been sure to have taken the first Lecture of the series 

 himself. I think the reasoning was, as a priori reasoning, quite 

 sound; but the conclusions were wrong in both cases, and therefore 

 I have been very distrustful of a priori reasoning ever since. 



