"So spake the false dissembler unperceived;
For neither man nor angel can discern
Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks
Invisible, except to God alone."
Milton, Paradise Lost (1667)
It was perhaps upon reading these lines that Phineas Taylor Barnum first thought, avarice stirring his soul, that a sucker is born every minute (if not more often). We are each us born with normal powers of perceptions, and so naturally discern the phenomena of the ordinary world of sense. We may each of us sharpen our senses, and thereby discern subtleties hidden from the untutored eye, ear, pallet, nose and touch. But we can none of us discern a truly "false dissembler." Strain as we might, we are blind as newborn kittens to the hypocrite, the phony, the fake, the sham, and the fraud.
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