WHY CHILD REN LIE. 383 



ent they influence so intimately our methods and standards of 

 education and culture that they call for more attention than has 

 yet been given them. It is particularly in regard to education 

 and the environment of children that I make these remarks, be- 

 cause here the effects act most powerfully for good or bad. Every 

 day I see children who exhibit these educational distortions, many 

 of which seem to a certain extent superfluous. And nothing is 

 more common than to find children, with an evidently rudimen- 

 tary conception of truth, who willfully and often for no reason 

 make exaggerated or false statements, who seem really to deceive 

 themselves as well as others, who make their relatives miserable 

 by threatened lack of responsibility, which, spreading out in 

 many ways, points to an unhappy or disgraceful life. 



This fear is so common that the majority of people, I fancy, 

 have felt it more or less. It is so natural to regard truth as the 

 foundation of our whole moral structure, to look upon it as the 

 loveliest product of a fine character, that any deviation from it 

 must necessarily be held as most unfortunate. I should be simi- 

 larly impressed if I did not feel certain that the fear is often 

 wrongly placed, that this habitual telling of falsehood has its 

 origin, not in viciousness or a spontaneous desire to deceive, but 

 rather in causes for which the person is not entirely respon- 

 sible ; which, on the contrary, are the natural results of natural 

 causes. 



The origin is to be sought among the fundamental workings of 

 the mind ; it begins with our first attempts at perception, our first 

 uses of words. A word is always a more or less complex idea 

 composed of more than one sort of image. According to our in- 

 nate tendencies these will be predominant as visual or speech or 

 writing or auditory images. They are elements which every one's 

 judgment in expression must use, and the variations give each 

 person his individuality. Most of us think in speech conceptions ; 

 we hear rather than see our thoughts. It is only occasional that 

 we find a man who sees a mental image of a concept, who clothes 

 his thoughts in written words. When we do, we have found an 

 artist who sees and remembers thoughts as well as things as defi- 

 nite memory pictures. Again, there is a class who speak or write 

 their thoughts internally, but the thought or the thing is always 

 expressed in letters. This association of thought with writing 

 movements is most often found in those of a decidedly literary 

 tendency, whose concepts appear to their consciousness as printed 

 lines. Of course, it goes without saying that no one is absolutely 

 confined to any one method. It is merely the predominance which 

 is sufficiently marked to give a trend of individuality. 



All these methods are simply the internal process of speech, 

 they are the body of our concepts. Likewise there must be an 



