to something else—a sense of awful wickedness, of having done violence to all that is right and holy. How, it may be asked, does it happen that children feel thus morally crushed after telling a lie?
Here is a question that can only be answered when we have more material. We know that lying is, among all childish offenses, the one which is apt to be specially branded by theological sanctions. The physical torments with which the "lying tongue" is threatened may well beget terror in a timid child's heart. I think it likely, too, that the awfulness of lying is thought of by children in its relation to the all-seeing God, who, though he can not be lied to, knows when we lie. Possibly the inaudible palliative words added to the lie are specially intended to put the speaker straight with the heart-searching God.
Further inquiry is, however, needed here. Do children contract a horror of a lie when no religious terrors are introduced? Is there anything in the workings of a child's own mind which would lead it to feel, after its first lie, as if the stable world were tumbling about its ears? Let parents supply us with facts here.
Meanwhile I will venture to put forth a conjecture, and will gladly withdraw it as soon as it is disproved.
So far as my inquiries have gone, I do not find that children brought up at home and kept from the contagion of bad example do uniformly develop a lying propensity. Several mothers assure me that their children have never seriously propounded an untruth. I can say the same about two children who have been especially observed for the purpose.[1]
This being so, I distinctly challenge the assertion that lying is instinctive in the sense that a child, even when brought up among habitual truth-tellers, shows an unlearned aptitude to say what it knows to be false.
I go further and suggest that where a child is brought up normally—that is, in a habitually truth-speaking community—he tends quite apart from moral instruction to acquire a respect for truth as what is customary. Consider for a moment how busily a child's mind is occupied during the first years of linguistic performance in getting at the bottom of words, of fitting ideas to words when trying to understand others, and words to ideas when trying to express his own thoughts, and you will see that all this must serve to make truth—that is, the correspondence of statement with facts—something matter-of-course, something not to be questioned, a law wrought into the very usages of daily life
- ↑ Dr. Stanley Hall, when he speaks of certain forms of lying as prevalent among children, is, as he expressly explains, speaking of children at school, where the forces of contagion are in full swing.
