We begin by collecting the _general_ information we possess about the document and the author, with the special purpose of discovering the conditions which may have influenced the production of the document--the epoch, the place, the purpose, the circumstances of its composition; the author's social status, country, party, sect, family, interests, passions, prejudices, linguistic habits, methods of work, means of information, culture, abilities, and mental defects; the nature of the facts and the mode of their transmission. Information on all these points is supplied by the preparatory critical investigation of authorship and sources. We now combine the different heads, mentally applying the set of general critical questions; this should be done at the outset, and the results impressed on the memory, for they will need to be present to the mind during the remainder of the operations. Thus prepared, we attack the document. As we read we mentally analyse it, destroying all the author's combinations, discarding all his literary devices, in order to arrive at the facts, which we formulate in simple and precise language. We thus free ourselves from the deference imposed by artistic form, and from all submission to the author's ideas--an emancipation without which criticism is impossible. The document thus analysed resolves into a long series of the author's conceptions and statements as to facts. With regard to each statement, we ask ourselves whether there is a probability of their being false or erroneous, or whether, on the other hand, there are exceptional chances in favour of good faith and accuracy, working through the list of critical questions prepared for particular cases. This list of questions must be always present to the mind. At first it may seem cumbersome, perhaps pedantic; but as it will be applied more than a hundred times in each page of the document, it will in the end be used unconsciously. As we read a text, all the reasons for distrust or confidence will occur to the mind simultaneously, combined into a single impression. Analysis and critical questioning will then have become a matter of instinct, and we shall have acquired for ever that methodically analytical, distrustful, not too respectful turn of mind which is often mystically called "the critical sense," but which is nothing else than an unconscious _habit_ of criticism. CHAPTER VIII THE DETERMINATION OF PARTICULAR FACTS Critical analysis yields in the result a number of conceptions and statements, accompanied by comments on the probability of the facts stated being accurate. It remains to examine how we can deduce from these materials those particular historical facts which are to form the basis of scientific knowledge. Conceptions and statements are two different kinds of results, and must be treated by different methods.