Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/835

Rh 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 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 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.

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.