But--by all this self-contradiction, the quality really proved is--not artlessness, but weakness: and, with the desire of deceiving, no degree of weakness, be it ever so high, is incompatible. By weakness, when risen even to insanity, artfulness is not excluded: and, in the fashioning, from beginning to end, of all this story, art, we see, is by no means deficient, how unhappily soever applied. But the story being such as it is, what matters it, as to the credence due to it, in what state, in respect of probity, was the author's mind? Being, as it is, to such a degree untrustworthy and incredible, as that, in so many parts of it, it is impossible it should have been true, the truth of it is impossible: what matters it then, whether it be to the weakness of the moral, or to that of the intellectual, quarter of the author's mind, that the falsity is to be ascribed? Not only in the whole does this history, anonymous as it is, present satisfactory marks of _genuineness_,--that is, of being written by the sort of person it professes to be written by, namely, a person who in the course of Paul's last excursion was taken into his suite; but in many parts, so does it of _historic verity_. True or not true,--like any other history ancient or modern, it has a claim to be provisionally taken for true, as to every point, in relation to which no adequate reason appears for the contrary: improbability, for example, of the supposed facts as related, contradictoriness to itself, contradictoriness to other more satisfactory evidence, or probable subjection to sinister and mendacity-prompting interest. But, under so much self-contradiction as hath been seen,--whether _bias_ be or be not considered, could any, the most ordinary fact, be regarded as being sufficiently proved? Meantime, let not any man make to himself a pretence for rejecting the important position thus offered to his consideration;--let him not, for fear of its being the truth, shut his eyes against that which is presented to him as and for the truth;--let him not shut his eyes, on any such pretence, as that of its being deficient in the quality of _seriousness_. If, indeed, there be any such duty, religious or moral, as that of _seriousness_; and that the stating as absurd that which is really absurd is a violation of that duty;--at that rate, _seriousness_ is a quality, incompatible with the delivery and perception of truth on all subjects, and in particular on this of the most vital importance: seriousness is a disposition to cling to falsehood, and to reject truth. In no part has any ridicule _ab extra_, been employed:--ridicule, by allusion made to another object, and that an irrelevant one.[12] SECTION 8. COMPANIONS--HAD PAUL ANY UPON THE ROAD?