[551] an authority ^aIN PRINCIPLE ! And your questions and criticisms, the open ones and the much more profound, hidden ones---of which I know---show me that I can be safe in this respect ! --- I am not authority IN PRINCIPLE for you. That is exactly what I mean. The authority in fact is a form of life which is going on any moment because we all are dependent on elements in which somebody else has more knowledge or insight than we ourselves have. Every statement about history, for instance, is based on authority in fact. All our images of the past, even about the

past in which you already were living as children or adolescents, the past of the First World War, or of the period between the First and the Second World War---everything which happened at that time, you take on authority because you were not there. And today most of the news which you cannot control yourselves, you take on the authority of the newspapers. Now this kind of authority, the authority of him who has immediate knowledge of facts and of him who is an expert in a special realm, is a continuous authority which I would call an authority in fact. There is a second degree of authority, which is more than this, which we can call the authority of trust. There are differences in this whole realm already in the authority of fact. You don't trust every newspaper equally. You don't trust every reporter about the era of Roosevelt^b equally. There is an element of trust connected with the factual, and you don't even consider every expert (for instance every professor of theology) as equally trustworthy. There is a whole realm in which an element comes into the picture which is not simply the element of immediate knowledge or of expert knowledge, but it is the element of a character which has proved