But, I think, there is a certain confusion between the demand for truth which is perfectly justified, and the demand for all the knowledge which has any bearing whatever upon the history of the person concerned. There are, after all, a great many facts of which one may as well be ignorant. They are irrelevant, and nobody would be the worse if they went into the waste-paper basket. It does not follow that because I want fact not fiction I therefore want all the facts, big and small; the poet's washing-bills, as well as his early drafts of great works. There are purposes, indeed, for which it is necessary to preserve everything that can be known. The scientific habit of mind demands, as I have said, the preservation of things in general, because some day anything may have its uses; the lawyer may feel bound to investigate every conceivable tittle of evidence, however minute the chance of its having any relevance; a biographer may be bound to act upon this principle in his investigations, and to follow out the ramifications of his hero's career as though he were engaged in the presumptuous attempt to find out everything about the Dreyfus case. But then he need not present the whole mass to the world. That might be desirable if the 'soul
