"For truth is as impossible to be soiled by any
outward touch as a sunbeam." MILTON.
"Odds life! must one swear to the truth of a song?" MATTHEW PRIOR.
"Get but the truth once uttered, and 'tis like
A star new-born that drops into its place,
And which, once circling in its placid round,
Not all the tumult of the earth can shake." LOWELL.
One of the rarest powers possessed by man is the power to state a fact. It seems a very simple thing to tell the truth, but, beyond all question, there is nothing half so easy as lying. To comprehend a fact in its exact length, breadth, relations, and significance, and to state it in language that shall represent it with exact fidelity, are the work of a mind singularly gifted, finely balanced, and thoroughly practiced in that special department of effort. The greatness of Daniel Webster was more apparent in his power to state a fact, or to present a truth, than in any other characteristic of his gigantic nature. It was the power of truth that won for him his forensic victories. Whenever he was truest to truth, then was truth truest to him. He was a man who implicitly believed in the power of truth to take care of itself when it had been fairly presented; and the failures of his life always grew out of his attempts to make falsehood look like truth--a field of effort in which the most gifted of his cotemporaries won the most brilliant of his triumphs.
The men are comparatively few who are in the habit of telling the truth. We all lie, every day of our lives--almost in every sentence we utter--not consciously and criminally, perhaps, but really, in that our language fails to represent truth, and state facts correctly. Our truths are half-truths, or distorted truths, or exaggerated truths, or sophisticated truths. Much of this is owing to carelessness, much to habit, and, more than has generally been supposed, to mental incapacity. I have known eminent men who had not the power to state a fact, in its whole volume and outline, because, first, they could not comprehend it perfectly, and, second, because their power of expression was limited. The lenses by which they apprehended their facts were not adjusted properly, so they saw every thing with a blur. Definite outlines, cleanly cut edges, exact apprehension of volume and weight, nice measurement of relations, were matters outside of their observation and experience. They had broad minds, but bungling; and their language was no better than their apprehensions--usually it was worse, because language is rarely as definite as apprehension. Men rarely do their work to suit them, because their tools are imperfect.
There are men in all communities who are believed to be honest, yet whose word is never taken as authority upon any subject. There is a flaw or a warp somewhere in their perceptions, which prevents them from receiving truthful impressions. Every thing comes to them distorted, as natural objects are distorted by reaching the eye through wrinkled window-glass. Some are able to apprehend a fact and state it correctly, if it have no direct relation to themselves; but the moment their personality, or their personal interest, is involved, the fact assumes false proportions and false colors. I know a physician whose patients are always alarmingly sick when he is first called to them. As they usually get well, I am bound to believe that he is a good physician; but I am not bound to believe that they are all as sick at beginning as he supposes them to be. The first violent symptoms operate upon his imagination and excite his fears, and his opinion as to the degree of danger attaching to the diseases of his patients is not worth half so much as that of any sensible old nurse. In fact, nobody thinks of taking it all; and those who know him, and who hear his sad representations of the condition of his patients, show equal distrust of his word and faith in his skill, by taking it for granted that they are in a fair way to get well.
It is impossible for bigots, for men of one idea, for fanatics, for those who set boundaries to themselves in religious, social, and political creeds, for men who think more of their own selfish interests than they do of truth, and for vicious men, to speak the truth. We are all, I suppose, bigots to a greater or less extent. We all have a creed written in our minds, or printed in our books; and to this we are more or less blindly attached. We set down an article of faith, or adopt an opinion, and nothing is allowed to interfere with it. If a sturdy fact comes along, and asks admission, we turn to our creed to see if we can safely entertain it. If the creed says "No," we say "No," and the fact is turned out of doors, and misrepresented after it is gone. Our creeds are our dwellings. They come next to us, and nothing can come to us, or go out from us, without going through our creeds. The simple fact of the death of Jesus Christ upon the cross, reaching the mind through various creeds, and passing out again, goes through as many phases as there are creeds, ranging through a scale which at one extreme presents a God dying to redeem the lost millions of a world, and, at the other, a benevolent, sweet-tempered man, yielding his life in testimony of the honesty of his teachings.
No new truth presents itself, which does not have to run the gauntlet of our creeds. If it get through alive, and seem disposed to be peaceable, and to remain subordinate to them, then we let it live, and receive it into respectable society;--otherwise, we entreat it shamefully. Sometimes the truth is too much for us, and asserts its power to stand without our help, and then we compromise with it. The world will turn on its axis, and wheel around its orbit, though we stop the mouth of the profane wretch who declares it; so, after a while, we get tired of fighting the fact, and shape our creeds accordingly. We fight the sturdy truths of geology, because they interfere with our creeds, but after awhile the sturdy truths of geology become too sturdy for us, and then we begin to patronize them, and to confer upon them the honor of harmonizing with our creeds. A man who has adopted the creed of a materialist, is entirely incompetent to receive, entertain, and represent a spiritual fact. My creed is the window at which I sit, and look at all the world of truth outside of me. All truth is tinted by the medium through which it passes to reach my mind; and such is my imperfection and my weakness, that I could not raise my window immediately, and place my soul in direct, vital contact with the great atmosphere of truth, if I would.
But if bigotry be such a bar to the correct perception of truth, what shall be said of self-interest and personal vices of appetite and passion? It is possible for no man who owns a slave and finds profit in such ownership, to receive the truth touching the right of man to himself, and the moral wrong of slavery. We have too much evidence that even creeds must bend to self-interest, and that any traffic will be regarded as morally right which is pecuniarily profitable. Once, in the creed of the slaveholders, slavery was admitted to be wrong, but that was when it was looked upon as temporary in its character, and, on the whole, evil in its results to all concerned. Now, when it is sought to be made a permanent institution, because it seems to be the only source of the wealth of a section, it has become right; and even the slave-trade logically falls into the category of laudable and legitimate commerce. It is impossible for a people who have allowed pecuniary interest to deprave their moral sense to this extent, to perceive and receive any sound political truth, or to apprehend the spirit and temper of those who are opposed to them. The same may be said of the liquor traffic. The act of selling liquor is looked upon with horror by those who stand outside, and who have an eye upon its consequences; but the seller deems it legitimate, and looks upon any interference with his sales as an infringement of his rights. Our selfish interest in any business, or in any scheme of profit, distorts all truth either directly or indirectly related to such business or scheme, or living in its region and atmosphere. The President of the United States, or the governor of the commonwealth, may be an excellent man; but if I want an office, and he fails to appoint me to it, why I don't exactly regard him as such. He becomes to me a very ordinary and vulgar sort of man indeed; but if he give me my office, then, though he may be all that his enemies think him, he seems to me to be invested with a singular nobility of character that other people do not apprehend at all.
The vices of humanity are sad media through which to receive truth--often so opaque that no truth can reach the mind at all. It is impossible for a man whose affections are bestialized, whose practices are libertine, and whose imaginations are all impure, to receive the truth that there are such things as purity and virtue, and that there are men and women around him who are virtuous and pure. There is no truth which personal vice will not distort. The approaches to a sensual mind are through the senses, and the same may be said of all minds in a general way; but the approaches to a sensual mind are only through the senses, and they, being perverted, abused, exhausted, or unduly excited, furnish the utterly unreliable avenues by which truth reaches the soul. The grand reason why truth, published from the pulpit and the platform, revealed in periodicals and books, and embodied in pictures and statues, works no greater changes upon the minds and morals of men, is, that it never gets inside of men in the shape in which it is uttered. It passes through such media of bigotry, or self-interest, or vice, that its identity and power are lost.
It is not, therefore, remarkable that so little truth is told when so little is received--that so little is expressed when so little is apprehended. The largest field will not produce an oat-straw that will stand alone, if there be no silica in the soil, and the largest mind cannot express a pure truth if it has lived always so encased that pure truth could not find its way into it. All truth reaches our minds through various media, by which it is more or less colored and refracted; and it is very rare that a man has the power to embody in language and utter a truth in the degree of perfection in which he received it. As I said at beginning, the power to state a fact correctly, or to express a pure truth, is among the rarest gifts of man. It never struck me that David was remarkably hasty, when he said that all men were liars. All men are liars, in one respect or another. They are divisible into various classes, which may legitimately be mentioned under two heads, viz., unconscious liars and conscious liars.
Of those who lie, and suppose they are telling the truth, I have already spoken. They are a large and most respectable class of people, and their apology must be found in the theory I have advanced; yet among these may be found men and women who will require all the amplitude of our mantles of charity to cover them. I have been much impressed with a passage in Dr. Bushnell's recent volume, entitled "Christian Nurture," which incidentally touches upon this subject, in the writer's characteristically powerful way; and as I cannot condense it, I will copy it:
"There is, in some persons who appear in all other respects to be Christian, a strange defect of truth, or truthfulness. They are not conscious of it. They would take it as a cruel injustice were they only to suspect their acquaintances of holding such an estimate of them. And yet, there is a want of truth in every sort of demonstration they make. It is not their words only that lie, but their voice, air, action; their every putting forth has a lying character. The atmosphere they live in is an atmosphere of pretence. Their virtues are affectations. Their compassions and sympathies are the airs they put on. Their friendship is their mood, and nothing more; and yet they do not know it. They mean, it may be, no fraud. They only cheat themselves so effectually as to believe that what they are only acting is their truth. And, what is difficult to reconcile, they have a great many Christian sentiments; they maintain prayer as a habit, and will sometimes speak intelligently of matters of Christian experience."
It was the oracular sage, Deacon Bedott, who, in view of the imperfections of his kind, remarked several times in his life: "we are all poor creeturs"--a remark that comes as near to being pure truth as any we meet with outside of the Bible and the standard treatises on mathematics. We are, indeed, poor creatures. Our highest conceptions of truth are contemptible, our best utterances fall short of our conceptions, and our lives are poorer than our language.
Of all conscious and criminal lying, I know of none that exceeds in malignity and magnitude that of a political campaign. In such a struggle, men get in love with lies. They seek apologies for the circulation of lies. They hug lies to their hearts in preference to truth. It is the habit of hopeful philosophers to enlarge upon the benefit to our people of the annual and quadrennial contests for place, which occur in our country, as if principles were the things really at stake, and personalities were out of the question, as the lying politicians would have us believe. What, in honesty, can be said of the leading speakers and the leading presses which sustain a party in a contest for power, but that they studiously misrepresent their opponents, misstate their own motives, give currency to false accusations, suppress truth that tells against them, exaggerate the importance of that which favors them, seize upon all plausible pretexts for fraud, skulk behind subterfuges, and lie outright when it is deemed necessary. And what can be expected more and better than this, when the leaders are office-seekers, who live and thrive on the grand basilar lie that the motive which inspires all their action is a regard for the popular good? Of course I speak generally. There are politicians and presses that are above personal considerations; but even these become infected with the prevalent poison of falsehood that is everywhere associated with their efforts.
The social lying of the world has found multitudinous satirists, and furnished the staple of a whole school of writers. We touch our hats in token of respect to men whom in our hearts we despise. We inquire tenderly for the health of persons for whom we do not care a straw. We who cannot afford it wear expensive clothing, and display grand equipage, and give costly entertainments, not because we enjoy it, but because we wish to impress upon the world the belief that we can afford it. It is our way of expressing a lie which seems to us important to the maintenance of our social standing. We receive with a kiss a visitor whom we wish were in Greenland, and betray her to the next who comes in. We pretend to ourselves and our neighbors that there is nothing which we so much esteem as the simple friendships of life, and the straight-forward love and hearty good will of the honest hearts around us, yet when the rich and the titled are near, we are gladdened and flattered, and look with supercilious contempt upon the humble friendships which we affected to cherish supremely. In our conscience and judgment, we appreciate the genuine values of social life, and we profess in our language to hold them in just estimation, but in our life and practice we honor that which is fictitious and conventional, apprehending in our conscience and judgment that we are acting a lie. Socially I cannot but believe that there is far more of truthfulness in humble than in high life. The more nearly we come down to hearty nature, and the further we go from, the artificial and conventional, the nearer do we come to truth. Truth is indeed at the bottom of this well, and not in the artificial wall that rises above it, nor the buckets that go up and down as caprice or selfishness turns the windlass.
Business lying is, after all, the most universal of any. It is confined to no age and no nation. Solomon understood the world's great game when he wrote: "It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer: but when he is gone his way, then he boasteth;" and from Solomon's day down to ours, buyers have depreciated that which they would purchase, and then boasted of their bargains. When two selfish persons meet on opposite sides of a counter, there rises between them a sort of antagonism. One is interested in selling an article of merchandise at the highest practicable profit, and the other is interested in obtaining it at the lowest possible price. Of the small, cunning lies that pass back and forth over that counter, of the half-truths told, and the whole truths suppressed, of deceptions touching the quality of goods on one side and the ability to buy on the other, it would be humiliating to tell. If every lie told in the shops, across mahogany and show-case, by buyers and sellers, were nailed like base coin to the counter, there would be no room for the display of goods. It is considered no mean compliment to a business man to say that he is sharp at a bargain; yet this sharpness is rarely more than the faculty of ingenious lying. A man who sells to me an article worth only five dollars for twice that sum is a "sharp man;" but he cannot make such a sale to me without telling me, in some way, a lie. The price he puts upon his merchandise is a lie, essentially, in itself.
There is a great deal of business lying that by long habit becomes unconscious. If we take up a newspaper, we shall find that quite a number of the stores around us, kept by our excellent friends, have "the largest and finest stock of goods ever displayed in the city." We shall find that they have been selling for years at "unprecedentedly low prices," that they are "selling at less than cost," that they are pushing off goods at rates "ruinously low," and that they can offer bargains to buyers that will confound their competitors. I suppose that none of these advertisers think they are lying, or, if they do, that their lying is of a harmful character. Lying in this way is supposed to be part of the legitimate machinery of trade. Promising definitely to finish work without the expectation of keeping the promise, or being able to keep it, is another kind of half unconscious lying. There are men engaged in various trades, in all communities, whose word is of no more value, when in the form of a promise to finish within a certain period a certain piece of work, than the fly-leaf of a last year's almanac. There are men whom every one knows who will lie without blushing about their work, and who will stand at their counter and lie all day, and then sleep with a peaceful conscience at night, having failed to fulfil a single pledge during their waking hours. Then there are people who will promise to pay bills, and promise a hundred times over, and never pay, and never expect to pay. When a bill is presented, they promise to pay, as a matter of course; and that is considered as good as the gold, until it is presented again; and then comes another promise, and another and another. The creditor knows the debtor lies, but many a debtor of this kind would feel insulted and injured by any spoken doubts of his truthfulness.
But the field is large, and I am already beyond the limits which I set for myself in these essays. It will be seen that I regard truthfulness as, on the whole, a rare article in this world. It is in some respects necessarily so. Many men are incapable of stating a fact or telling a truth. They have not the power to comprehend or express either. The majority of men receive truth through such media of prejudice, selfishness, bigotry, sensuality, and the like, that they never get it pure, and are therefore incapable of uttering it correctly, even when their power of expression equals their power of perception, which is not commonly the case. So there is a world of unconscious lying; but I am sorry to believe that there is just as large a world of conscious lying. In politics, society, and business, the conscious and intentional lie abounds. "Lord! how this world is given to lying!"
Well, all this can be improved. Men can cultivate the power to apprehend and express truth. They can cast off the prejudice, selfishness, bigotry, and sensuality that prevent them from receiving truth. They can refrain from conscious lying; and no one doubts that the world would be greatly improved by honest efforts directed to these ends. Only the naked soul, in Eternity's white light, can be wholly truthful; but we can all try for it, and we shall find our highest account in trying.
[The end]
Timothy Titcomb's essay: Truth And Truthfulness