There can be no honesty without knowing. To be honest is to wish to get pleasure by the facts of oneself and everything else: and this means the whole of the facts. We can hardly do this unless we know the facts; and we can hardly know the facts unless we want to know them.

To want to know the facts of things, and ourselves, is to think we can get pleasure by this knowing. This means that a person who doesn’t have pleasure in being honest, is not wholly honest.

Honesty is the instinctive employment of what is, as it is, for one’s desires. It is a belief, a trust, a gaiety and exaltation in what is. In every one of us there is a desire to accommodate the motives or purposes of the self to what is; or a fear of doing so, which is equivalent to making what is, fit our desires prematurely, disproportionately, inaccurately.

If honesty were based on the facts, without happiness in the facts, then honesty would be sacrificial; also superficial. Honesty means giving the self all that is coming to it, and sacrifice means giving less—if sacrifice is something else than just or necessary. (If it is just and necessary, it is plain fairness, and need not be called sacrifice.)

Honesty, then, is an accurate, whole relation of the self to what it is, and everything else. If something less than this is gone for, then so much is honesty less, or adulterated, or corrupted. Honesty exists in proportion as there is desire to find happiness in more and more and more facts or knowing. When we no longer wish to know, or when our desire to know becomes weaker, or flaccid, or secondary—that much our honesty is being shown the door.