Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/395

Rh 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, because 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 rudimentary 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 similarly 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 responsible; 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 innate 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 definite 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