(5) The fixed dogma that most writers of the past have spent most of their time in forging.
Now to test these nincompoops I will consider a contemporary document which I know a good deal about, called The Path to Rome. It professes to be the record of a journey by one H. Belloc in the year 1901 from Toul in Lorraine to Rome in Italy. I will suppose that opus to have survived through some accident into a time which preserved few contemporary documents, but which had, through tradition and through a knowledge of surrounding circumstance, a popular idea of what the opening of the twentieth century was like, and a pathetic belief that Belloc had taken this journey in the year 1901.
This is how the Very Learned would proceed to teach the vulgar a lesson in scepticism.
"A critical examination of the document has confirmed me in the conclusion that the so-called Path to Rome is composed of three distinct elements, which I will call A, W, and [Greek: theta]." (See my article E.H.R., September 3, 113, pp. 233 et seq. for [Greek: theta]. For W, see Furth in Die Quellen Critik, 2nd Semestre, 3117.)
Of these three documents A is certainly much earlier than the rather loose criticism of Polter in England and Bergmann upon the Continent decided some years ago in the Monograph of the one, and the Discursions which the other has incorporated in his Neo-Catholicism in the Twenty-Second Century.
The English scholar advances a certain inferior limit of A.D. 2208, and a doubtful superior limit of A.D. 2236. The German is more precise and fixes the date of A in a year certainly lying between 2211 and 2217. I need not here recapitulate the well-known arguments with which this view is supported (See Z.M. fs. (Mk. 2) Arch., and the very interesting article of my friend Mr. Gouch in the Pursuits of the A.S.) I may say generally that their argument reposes upon two considerations:
(1) The Centime, a coin which is mentioned several times in the book, went out of circulation before the middle of the twenty-first century, as we know from the only extant letter (undoubtedly genuine) of Henri Perro to the Prefect of Aude.
This gives them their superior limit. But it is the Inferior Limit which concerns us most, and here the argument reposes upon one phrase. (Perkins' edition, p..) This phrase is printed in italics, and runs, "Deleted by the Censor."
It is advanced that we know that a censorship of books was first established in America (where, as I shall show, The Path to Rome was written) in the year 2208, and there is ample evidence of the fact that no such institution was in actual existence before the twenty-second century in the English-speaking countries, though there is mention of it elsewhere in the twenty-first, and a fragment of the twentieth appears to allude to something of the kind in Russia at that time. (Baker has confused the Censorship of Books with that of Plays, and an unknown form of art called "Morum"; probably a species of private recitation.)