I will 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 performance 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 fact, to the child-mind something
matter-of-course, something not to be questioned, a law wrought into the
very usages of daily life 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
reverence. 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 practice 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 a shock, a horror, a giddy and aching
sense of having violated law—law not wholly 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 recognise, in the case of cruelty and of lying
alike, that children are by no means morally perfect, but 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
promptings 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.
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