Written by Faex Acerbitatis during his time at the Inceptum, the book is clearly influenced by the writings of Faex's mentor and colleague Scriba Fusca, and indeed, from the first chapter the work initially appears to be little more than a reiteration of the ideas set forth in Vera et Falsa, with perhaps a bit of watered-down de vertitate mixed in. By the third chapter, however, Faex moves away from the basics and launches into territory all his own, attempting to describe and to categorize all of those things which can be said to be neither res verae (things of objective reality) nor res fictae (things of fiction).
The error sincerus gets a good deal of attention here, of course, but the work not only identifies a huge number of subsets of 'sincerely held misbeliefs,' but also then goes on to describe a host of variations on the related phenomenon known as et creditum et non creditum --that which is both believed and disbelieved. Things which are neither believed nor disbelieved, things which are believed in spite of one wishing not to believe in them, things disbelieved in spite of a sincere desire to believe in them, and so forth, are all painstakingly analyzed and categorized in the first half of the book.
The second half of the book concerns itself mainly with the question of underlying motivation for fallacious belief: why do people persist in believing in things that seem so evidently incorrect? It is in this part of the text that the author's at times rather unpleasant cynicism shows itself most baldly.
Although the author was well-known to have had a poor relationship with his parens Collacteus, known by some as the "King-maker of Antrum," many have seen strong traces of Collacteus' influence in this work, particularly in its later chapters, which concern themselves--albeit in a somewhat hostile manner--with issues of political expedience and realpolitik. Some claim, for example, that only a mage who had been raised by a highly politicized Cristoferean at Covenant Antrum would ever even have thought to draw such delicate distinctions between the res fictae utilis ("the useful fictions") and the fallacia accomodata ("the convenient falsehoods").
Others have seen a good deal of Lemmite influence in the work, particularly in the segment devoted to the ineptiae verae ("truthful nonsense").
