The Works of Francis Bacon ...

What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. Certainly there be that delight in giddiness, and count it a bondage to fix a belief; affecting free-will in thinking, as well as in acting : and, though the sects of philosophers of that kind be gone, yet there remain certain discoursing wits which are of the same veins, though there be not so much blood in them as was in those of the ancients. But it is not only the difficulty and labour which men take in finding out of truth; nor again, that, when it is found, it imposeth upon men's thoughts, that doth bring lies in favour;

but a natural, though corrupt love of the lie
itself. One of the later schools of the Grecians
examineth the matter, and is at a stand to think
what should be in it, that men should love lies,
where neither they make for pleasure, as with
poets; nor for advantage, as with the merchant ;
but for the lie's sake. But I cannot tell: this
same truth is a naked and open daylight, that
doth not shew the masques, and mummeries,
and triumphs of the world half so stately and
daintily as candlelights. Truth may perhaps
come to the price of a pearl, that sheweth best
by day; but it will not rise to the price of a dia-
mond or carbuncle, that sheweth best in varied
lights. A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure.
Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken
out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering
hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one
would, and the like, but it would leave the
minds of a number of men, poor shrunken
things, full of melancholy and indisposition,
and unpleasing to themselves? One of the
fathers, in great severity, called poesy, “vinum
“ dæmonum,” because it filleth the imagination,
and yet it is but with the shadow of a lie.
But it is not the lie that passeth through the

mind, but the lie, that sinketh in and settleth in it, that doth the hurt, such as we spake of before. But howsoever these things are thus in men's depraved judgments and affections, yet truth, which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the enquiry of truth, which is the love-making, or wooing of it; the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it; and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it; is

; the sovereign good of human nature. The first creature of God, in the works of the days, was the light of the sense; the last was the light of reason; and his sabbath work, ever since, is the illumination of his Spirit. First he breathed light upon the face of the matter, or chaos; then he breatheth light into the face of man; and still he breatheth and inspireth light into the face of his chosen. The poet that beautified the sect, that was otherwise inferior to the rest, saith yet excellently well, “ It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to “ see ships tost upon the sea: a pleasure to stand “ in the window of a castle, and to see a battle, " and the adventures thereof below : but no "pleasure is comparable to the standing upon “ the vantage ground of truth (a hill not to be

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