ln the opening line of his essay {On Truth°, Francis Bacon ticks off Pontius Pilate for not giving the subject its due time and gravity—"‘What is truth?”, said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.° If Pilate had stayed for an answer, he would have been waiting a long time—four centuries after Bacon, and twenty after Christ, the jury is still out. But things do seem to have been moving along quite nicely this past century or so; and as Pilate might note with satisfaction, he himself has been getting a better press. Perhaps Nietzscheis extravagant compliment was a mixed blessing: Nietzsche declared (°as offensively as possiblei, as Will Durant [1929: 25] put it) that...