808 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



uals of one species of these sea plants hardly contain a half 

 gramme of organic substance, the endless mass of life that 

 perishes to form the material for a whale, for instance, becomes 

 inconceivable. Translated for The Popular Science Monthly 

 from the Deutsche Rundschau. 



STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 



XI. MATERIAL OF MORALITY. 



By JAMES SULLY, M. A.,LL.D., 



GROTE PROFESSOR OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND AND LOGIC AT THE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, 



LONDON. 



(b) UNTRUTH AND TRUTH. 



W'E may now turn to the other main charge against children, 

 that of lying. According to many, children are in general 

 accomplished little liars, to the manner born, and equally adept 

 with the mendacious savage. Even writers on childhood by no 

 means prejudiced against them lean to the view that untruth is 

 universal among children and to some extent at least innate.* 



Here, surely, there is need of discrimination. A lie connotes, 

 or should connote, an assertion made with full consciousness of 

 its untruth and in order to mislead. It may well be doubted 

 whether little children have so clear an apprehension of what we 

 understand by truth and falsity as to be liars in this full sense. 

 Much of what seems shocking to the adult unable to place him- 

 self at the level of childish intelligence and feeling will probably 

 prove to be something far less serious. It is satisfactory to note 

 a tendency to take a milder and more reasonable view of this in- 

 fantile fibbing ; and what follows is based upon the excellent 

 recent studies of Dr. Stanley Hall and M. Compayre*. f 



It is desirable to inspect a little more closely the various forms 

 of this early mendacity. To begin with those little ruses and dis- 

 simulations which according to M. Perez are apt to appear almost 

 from the cradle in the case of certain children, it is plainly diffi- 

 cult to bring them under the category of full-fledged lies. When, 

 for example, a child wishing to keep a thing hides it, and on your 

 asking for it holds out its empty hands, it would be hard to say 

 that this was a lie, even though there is a germ of deception in 

 the action. We must remember that children have an early devel- 

 oped instinct to secrete things, and the little dissimulations in these 



* See the quotations from Montaigne and Perez given by Compayre, op. cit., p. 309 ff. 

 f Stanley Hall, Children's Lies, American Journal of Psychology, 1890. Compayre, 

 op. cit., p. 309 ff. 



