Publisher's Synopsis
WHAT is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. Certainly there be, thatdelight in giddiness, and count it a bondage to fix a belief; affecting free-will in thinking, as well as inacting. And though the sects of philosophers of that kind be gone, yet there remain certaindiscoursing wits, which are of the same veins, though there be not so much blood in them, as was inthose of the ancients. But it is not only the difficulty and labor, which men take in finding out oftruth, nor again, that when it is found, it imposeth upon men's thoughts, that doth bring lies infavor; but a natural, though corrupt love, of the lie itself. One of the later school 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 forthe lie's sake. But I cannot tell; this same truth, is a naked, and open day-light, that doth not showthe masks, and mummeries, and triumphs, of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights.Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that showeth best by day; but it will not rise to theprice of a diamond, or carbuncle, that showeth best in varied lights. A mixture of a lie doth ever addpleasure. Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of men's minds, vain opinions, flatteringhopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds, of anumber of men, poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing tothemselves?One of the fathers, in great severity, called poesy vinum daemonum, because it fireth theimagination; and yet, it is but with the shadow of a lie. But it is not the lie that passeth through themind, but the lie that sinketh in, and settleth in it, that doth the hurt; such as we spake of before