VI. _Pseudomania._ We have little to say on this score, except to counsel parents to keep watch at the place of the letting out of waters. No doubt the condition is pathological, and calls for curative treatment rather than punishment. But we believe it is a condition which never need be set up. The girl who has been able to win esteem for what she really is and really does, is not tempted to “pose,” and the boy who has found full outlet for his energies, physical and mental, has no part of himself left to spend upon “humbugging.” This is one of the cases which show how important it is for parents to acquaint themselves with that delicate borderland of human nature which touches the material and the spiritual. How spiritual thought and material brain interact; how brain and nerves are inter-dependent; how fresh air and wholesome food affect the condition of the blood which nourishes the nerves; how the nerves again may bear tyrannous sway over all that we include under “bodily health;” these are matters that the parent should know who would avoid the possibility of the degradation described as Pseudomania from being set up in any one of his children. It is as well that those who have to do with young people should be familiar with one or two marked signs of this mentally diseased condition; as, the furtive glance from under half-closed lids, shot up to see how you are taking it all; the flowing recital, accompanied by a slightly absent pre-occupied look, which denotes that the speaker is in the act of inventing the facts he relates. We have not space to enlarge upon _palliatives_, _lies of terror_, or one or two more classes of lies, which seem to us of frequent occurrence, as _lies of display_ (boasting), _lies of carelessness_ (inaccuracy), and, worst of all, _lies of malice_ (false witness). We would only commend the subject to the attention of parents; for, though one child may have more aptitude than another, neither truthfulness nor the multiplication table come by nature. The child who appears to be perfectly truthful is so because he has been carefully trained to truthfulness, however indirectly and unconsciously. It is more important to cultivate the habit of truth than to deal with the accident of lying. Moral teaching must be as simple, direct and definite as the teaching which appeals to the intellect; presented with religious sanctions, quickened by religious impulses, but not limited to the prohibitions of the law nor to the penalties which overtake the transgressor. FOOTNOTES: [15] Professor G. Stanley Hall, in an article which appeared in the _American Journal of Psychology_, Jan. 1891. CHAPTER XX _SHOW CAUSE WHY_