9. We may therefore sometimes avoid seeming to know what we know, or
to be what we are. But we may never of our own proper motion step
forward and court observation as being what we are not, or knowing
what is against or beyond our knowledge. We may dissemble
occasionally, but not simulate. The dissembler of a secret wishes for
obscurity and silence: he wants to have the eyes of men turned away
from him and their curiosity unroused. Whatever he says or does is to
divest the idea of there being anything particularly interesting about
him. But he who simulates--call him pretender, impostor, or quack--is
nothing, if not taken notice of. The public gaze is his sunshine:
obscurity gives him a deadly chill. His ambition is to appear out of
the ordinary, being really quite within common lines: the dissembler
is in some respect beyond the ordinary, but wishes not to show himself
otherwise than as an ordinary mortal with ordinary knowledge. The
pretender is on the offensive, challenging attention: the dissembler
is on his defence against notice. "Simulation," says Bolingbroke, "is
a stiletto, not only an offensive but an unlawful weapon, and the use
of it may be rarely, very rarely, excused, but never justified.
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