The Lecture
“The Truth” was one of Ingersoll’s last major lectures, delivered in 1897, two years before his death. It is a sustained meditation on the nature of truth, the courage required to pursue it, and the civilization that honest inquiry might yet produce.
What Is Truth?
Pilate asked this question of Christ, and received no answer — or if he received an answer, the gospels do not record it.
I will try to answer it myself.
Truth is the correspondence between a belief and the facts of the world. A belief is true if it accurately represents reality; false if it does not. This is simple, and it is the only definition that makes sense.
But knowing this definition does not make the pursuit of truth easy. It requires:
First, the willingness to examine your beliefs honestly, without assuming in advance that they are correct. This means being willing to find that things you have believed your whole life are wrong. This is uncomfortable. Many people find it impossible.
Second, the willingness to accept the conclusions of honest examination, even when they are unwelcome. To say: “I thought this was true, but the evidence says it is not, and therefore I was wrong.”
Third — and most difficult — the willingness to say, in public, what you have honestly concluded, regardless of the social or professional cost.
These are the requirements of the pursuit of truth. They are not easy requirements. But they are the only honest ones.
The Cowardice of Dishonesty
I want to speak plainly about intellectual cowardice — the habit of pretending to believe things you do not believe, in order to avoid the discomfort of honest doubt.
This is one of the great moral failures of our civilization. It corrupts education, because teachers teach what they are permitted to teach rather than what they actually believe. It corrupts religion, because people recite creeds they have not examined and could not defend. It corrupts politics, because politicians say what their constituents want to hear rather than what the situation demands.
The honest man — the man who says exactly what he thinks, and admits exactly what he does not know — is rare. He is rare because the social penalties for honesty are real and often severe. He is rare because the rewards for comfortable conformity are real and often seductive.
But he is the only person from whom you can learn anything.
On Being Called Dangerous
I have been called dangerous. I have been told that my views, freely expressed, will corrupt the faith of the innocent and lead souls to perdition.
I accept this characterization — in a different sense from that intended.
I am dangerous to false certainty. I am dangerous to the pretense that questions have been settled when they have not been settled. I am dangerous to the assumption that inherited doctrine requires no examination.
These are, in my view, things worth being dangerous to.
The man who has never examined his beliefs has not really owned them. He has simply inherited them, as he might inherit a piece of furniture — without choosing it, without understanding why it was made, without knowing whether it serves any purpose he actually cares about.
I prefer beliefs that I have earned — that I have examined, tested, found consistent with the evidence, and deliberately chosen.
The Reward of Honesty
I am sometimes asked: what do you get from honesty? If honest inquiry leads to doubt rather than comfort, to questions rather than answers, to the loss of faith rather than its consolation — why pursue it?
I will tell you what I get.
I get a clear conscience. I get the knowledge that what I say is what I actually think. I get the respect — not always public, but personal — of those who have examined the same questions and arrived at similar conclusions. I get the ability to look at the world without the constant labor of maintaining a fiction.
And I get — most importantly — the genuine love of those closest to me. Because the love of people who know you honestly is worth more than the approval of people who know you falsely.
“The man who tells the truth needs no memory.”
This is more than a clever observation. It is a description of the enormous cognitive and emotional burden of dishonesty — the labor of maintaining consistent lies, of remembering what you have told to whom, of managing the elaborate fiction that passes for your public self.
The honest man is free from all of this. He has only one story, and it is the true one.
The Vision of a Rational World
I will close with a vision.
I see a world in which every child is taught to ask “How do we know this?” rather than “Who told us this?” A world in which intellectual honesty is cultivated as a virtue from early childhood. A world in which the admission of uncertainty is respected rather than condemned.
In such a world, the enormous energies that are currently expended in the defense of inherited falsehood could be redirected toward the discovery of truth. The prodigious intelligence that is currently employed in the elaboration of theological systems no one believes could be employed in the investigation of the actual world.
This is the world I want to live in. I am not certain I will live to see it.
But truth is patient. And truth, in the end, tends to win.
“Truth is the only thing worth fighting for.”
“The Truth” appears in Volume 4 of the Dresden Edition.