STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 817 



which he never thinks of disobeying. We can see that children 

 accustomed to truth- speaking show all the signs of a moral shock 

 when they are confronted with assertions which, as they see, do 

 not answer to fact. The child C- was highly indignant' on 

 hearing from his mother that people said what he considered 

 false things about horses and other matters of interest ; and he 

 was even more indignant at meeting with any such falsity in one 

 of his books, for which he had all a child's respect. The idea of 

 perpetrating a knowing untruth, so far as I can judge, is simply 

 awful to a child who has been thoroughly habituated to the prac- 

 tice of truthful statement. May it, then, not well be that when a 

 preternatural pressure of circumstances pushes the child over the 

 boundary line of truth, he feels shock, horror, a giddy and aching 

 sense of having violated law law not imposed by the mother's 

 command, but rooted in the very habits of social life ? I think 

 the conjecture is well worth considering. 



Our inquiry has led us to recognize, in the case of cruelty and 

 of lying alike, that children are by no means morally perfect ; 

 they have tendencies which, if not counteracted or held in check 

 by others, will develop into true cruelty and true lying. On the 

 other hand, our study has shown us that these impulses are not 

 the only ones. A child has impulses of kindness, which alternate, 

 often in a capricious-looking way, with those of inconsiderate 

 teasing and tormenting ; and he has, I hold, side by side with the 

 imaginative and other tendencies which make for untruthful 

 statement, the instinctive roots of a respect for truth. These 

 tendencies have not the same relative strength and frequency of 

 utterance in the case of all children, some showing, for example, 

 more of the impulse which makes for truth, others more of the 

 impulse which makes for untruth. Yet in all children probably 

 both kinds of impulse are to be observed. All which means that 

 the child is at first a congeries of uncoordinated propensities, 

 some favorable, others unfavorable, to what we mean by goodness, 

 and that education has to transform this into a moral organism 

 in which the tendencies to the good shall become supreme and 

 act controllingly on the tendencies to the bad. 



The English Chemical Society has conferred its Faraday medal on Lord 

 Rayleigh in recognition of the investigation that has led to the discovery 

 of argon. Chemists have before this made excursions into the domain of 

 physics; but Lord Rayleigh, a physicist and mathematician, has turned the 

 tables upon them by making a discovery of first-rate importance in the 

 domain of chemical inquiry. His work is the more remarkable because it 

 was carried on on purely physical lines. It is curious to reflect that only 

 lack of needful delicacy in measurement delayed for one hundred and ten 

 years the discovery on the threshold of which Cavendish stood in 1785. 



VOL. XLTII. 66 



