“What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.”

What does it mean?

The usual reading takes Pilate's jest as a picture of people who enjoy not settling, and who leave before an answer can bind them. Bacon does not stop at the joke. The essay goes on to say there is a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself, and that truth is a naked daylight that shows the masks of the world less grandly than candlelight. A competing reading treats the sentence as Bacon's scepticism, as if he sided with Pilate. He does not. The sentence is the opening of Of Truth in the 1625 Essays, and it is an accusation of impatience. Staying for an answer is the intellectual virtue the jest refuses. The rest of the essay is what staying would be like.

Did Francis Bacon really say this?

The library’s label is Well attested. Bacon's own English, the opening sentence of the 1625 essay Of Truth. The essay was not in the 1597 collection. 'Knowledge itself is power' is a different work, the Meditationes Sacrae.

Where it comes from

Essays, 'Of Truth' (1625)

Approximate date: 1625.

How to use it

A meeting in a London office that asks 'what is the evidence?' and then moves to the next slide before anyone can answer is Pilate's jest in modern dress. The sentence does not say every question has a quick answer. It says the jest is in not staying. A team that praises critical thinking and schedules no time to hear the reply has repeated the gesture he mocks. The essay's point is that the dodge is pleasant.

A mindset reading

Notice when a clever question is being used to exit. The habit is to stay for the cost of an answer, including the cost of having your own preferred story look plainer in daylight. Bacon thinks we love the lie for itself, not only for advantage. The opening sentence is a diagnosis of that pleasure, not a quip to put on a mug.

Understand the philosophy

Of Truth is a moral essay, not the Novum Organum. The key figure is Pilate, who asks what truth is and does not wait. Bacon links that impatience to a love of falsehood and then to the claim that inquiry, knowledge, and belief in truth are the sovereign good of human nature. The idols of the mind, in the Novum Organum, are his later technical account of why the mind distorts. This sentence is the human reluctance that makes those idols comfortable.

Related

• “Knowledge itself is power.”

  Paraphrase or translation

• “Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.”

  Well attested

• “There are four classes of Idols which beset men's minds.”

  Paraphrase or translation

Related fallacy. Appeal to authority. Citing an expert is reasonable when the person is expert on this question, the field has real standards, and serious disagreement is not hidden. The appeal fails when the authority is in the wrong field, is unnamed, or is treated as settling a question experts still dispute.

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