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the ultimate integrity of the text is governed by no theoretical presumptions: its final conclusions must rest on the intrinsic verisimilitude or suspiciousness of the text itself.

86. These considerations have an important bearing on certain paradoxical conflicts of evidence respecting transmitted variations, which present themselves occasionally in most texts and frequently in many; and which are peculiarly apt to mislead editors to whom textual criticism is only a subordinate province of interpretation. The reading clearly indicated by Genealogical or other evidence obtained from whole texts, or by Transcriptional Evidence of Readings, or by both together, may be as clearly condemned by Intrinsic Evidence. We are not speaking of the numerous cases in which readings that have seemed to a critic in the first instance too strange to be true approve themselves on better knowledge, perhaps as no more than tolerable, but oftener still as having a peculiar impress of truth which once apprehended cannot easily be questioned; or in which competent critics receive opposite impressions from the same reading, one holding it to be impossible, the other to have the stamp of originality. These differences of judgement throw no light upon readings which all competent critics feel on consideration to be impossible, and yet which are strongly attested by, it may be, every kind of evidence except Intrinsic Evidence.

87. The true solution lies in the fact that the subject matter of the different kinds of evidence is not identical. Intrinsic Evidence is concerned only with absolute originality; it pronounces which of two or more words or phrases a given author in a given place was more likely to use, or, in extreme cases in either direction, whether either of them was what he must have used or could not possibly have used. All other kinds of evidence are concerned only or predominantly with relative originality: they pronounce, speaking roughly, which of two or more readings is more likely to have given rise to the others, or is found in the best company, or has the best pedigree. The apparent conflict therefore is dependent on the assumption, usually well founded, that the two originalities coincide. Where they do not, that is, where corruption has preceded the earliest extant documentary evidence, the most nearly original extant reading may nevertheless be wrong, simply because the reading of the autograph