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Rh faith certainly did not come to him in that way. All the same he asks whether dissembling can be absolutely condemned. He has to admit that it has played a part in the evolution of man, and even in the evolution of morality. In his conduct primitive man more or less concealed his real self; he, so to speak, clothed himself with the mores of his environment, and put his fearful side out of sight—his morality was a kind of protective device. Yet paradoxically enough the pretense might become reality in time; for if dissimulation is practised long enough, it becomes nature. This holds of the strong as well as the weak. "Goodness has been most developed by long-continued dissimulation which sought to appear goodness: everywhere, where great power existed, the necessity of just this kind of dissimulation was perceived—it inspired assurance and confidence and multiplied an hundredfold the actual amount of physical force." "In the same way honor has been developed to great proportions by the demand for an appearance of honor and uprightness—in hereditary aristocracies." Falsehood is then, if not the mother, the nurse of goodness. By a kind of biological dialectic dissimulation at last abolishes itself, and organs and instincts are the little expected fruits in the garden of hypocrisy. Evidently then truthfulness, as the opposite of playing a part, is not an absolute duty. Nietzsche even thinks that a philosopher, who will be at the same time a great teacher, must assume some of the rights of a teacher and hold back much; yet he must not be suspected of doing so, and a part of his mastery will consist in the success of his dissimulation.

Second, is there a strict obligation to know the truth—never to be deceived? Probably few men have had a finer intellectual conscience than Nietzsche—it is the key to much that was tragic in his intellectual history: he would not be taken in, whether as to the make-up of existence, as to religion, as to Wagner, as to Schopenhauer, as to morality, or as to truth itself. But this was his idiosyncrasy—did he regard the remorseless pursuit