In what way we, too, are still pious. – In science, convictions have no right to citizenship, as one says with good reason: only when they decide to step down to the modesty of a hypothesis, a tentative experimental standpoint, a regulative fiction,1 may they be granted admission and even a certain value in the realm of knowledge – though always with the restriction that they remain under police supervision, under the police of mistrust. But doesn’t this mean, on closer consideration, that a conviction is granted admission to science only when it ceases to be a conviction? Wouldn’t the cultivation of the scientific spirit begin when one permitted oneself no more convictions? That is probably the case; only we need still ask: in order that this cultivation begin, must there not be some prior conviction – and indeed one so authoritative and unconditional that it sacrifices all other convictions to itself? We see that science, too, rests on a faith; there is simply no ‘presuppositionless’ science. The question whether truth is necessary must get an answer in advance, the answer ‘yes’, and moreover this answer must be so firm that it takes the form of the statement, the belief, the conviction: ‘Nothing is more necessary than truth; and in relation to it, everything else has only secondary value.’ This unconditional will to truth – what is it? Is it the will not to let oneself be deceived? Is it the will not to deceive? For the will to truth could be interpreted in this second way, too – if ‘I do not want to deceive myself’ is included as a special case under the generalization ‘I do not want to deceive.’ But why not deceive? But why not allow oneself to be deceived? Note that the reasons for the former lie in a completely different area from those for the latter: one does not want to let oneself be deceived because one assumes it is harmful, dangerous, disastrous to be deceived; in this sense science would be a long-range prudence, caution, utility, and to this one could justifiably object: How so? Is it really less harmful, dangerous, disasterous not to want to let oneself be deceived? What do you know in advance about the character of existence to be able to decide whether the greater advantage is on the side of the unconditionally distrustful or of the unconditionally trusting? But should both be necessary – a lot of trust as well as a lot of mistrust – then where might science get the unconditional belief or conviction on which it rests, that truth is more important than anything else, than every other conviction? Precisely this conviction could never have originated if truth and untruth had constantly made it clear they they were both useful, as they are. So, the faith in science, which after all undeniably exists, cannot owe its origin to such a calculus of utility; rather it must have originated in spite of the fact that the disutility and dangerousness of ‘the will to truth’ or ‘truth at any price’ is proved to it constantly. ‘At any price’: we understand this well enough once we have offered and slaughtered one faith after another on this altar! Consequently, ‘will to truth’ does not mean ‘I do not want to let myself be deceived’ but – there is no alternative – ‘I will not deceive, not even myself’; and with that we stand on moral ground. For you have only to ask yourself carefully, ‘Why do you not want to deceive?’ especially if it should seem – and it does seem! – as if life aimed at semblance, i.e. error, deception, simulation, blinding, self-blinding, and when life on the largest scale has actually always shown itself to be on the side of the most unscrupulous *polytropoi.*2 Charitably interpreted, such a resolve might perhaps be a quixotism, a slight, enthusiastic folly; but it could also be something worse, namely a principle that is hostile to life and destructive. ‘Will to truth’ – that could be a hidden will to death. Thus the question ‘Why science?’ leads back to the moral problem: Why morality at all, if life, nature, and history are ‘immoral’? No doubt, those who are truthful in that audacious and ultimate sense which faith in science presupposes thereby affirm another world than that of life, nature, and history; and insofar as they affirm this ‘other world’, must they not by the same token deny its counterpart, this world, our world?…But you will have gathered what I am getting at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests – that even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato’s faith, that God is truth; that truth is divine… But what if this were to become more and more difficult to believe, if nothing more were to turn out to be divine except error, blindness, the lie – if God himself were to turn out to be our longest lie?