816 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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 tell- 

 ing 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 theologi- 

 cal 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 con- 

 tract 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 un- 

 truth. I can say the same about two children who have been 

 especially observed for the purpose.* 



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 per- 

 formance 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 chil- 

 dren, is, as he expressly explains, speaking of children at school, where the forces of con- 

 tagion are in full swing. 



