CHAPTER IX
THE HABIT OF FALSEHOOD
THE continued reiteration of a fantasy produces an impression on the brain cells akin to the impression produced by a fact. The fantasy of imagination roams without check or hindrance by childhood until it reaches a land which is believed to be reality. The borderland between fiction and fact is not always clearly defined and the immature mind of youth generally fails to distinguish the line where the one ends and the other begins. Fantasy is as real to childhood as reality.
Who cannot recall in his own childhood an event which illustrates the point? I was once the happy owner of a snare drum which filled a large place in my life. But I repeatedly and proudly claimed the ownership of two drums—a bass as well as a snare drum. My claim to the possession of a bass drum was founded on the discovery of a board in the wall of the barn, which, when struck with the fist, gave forth a sound which my childish fancy decided could be only the boom of a bass drum. While a companion beat this sounding board with his fist, I played the snare drum in unison. I never realized that I was lying when I said I owned two drums. I was not. The sounding board was as real a drum to the mind of my childhood as it is unreal to the mind of my maturity.
A little lad rushed into his mother’s room exclaiming, “Mamma, a hundred big Indians tried to catch me. I shot ’em. I killed two or free.” He was arrayed in an Indian suit, with a toy bow and arrows. The back yard was the battle field which his imagination filled with blood-thirsty warriors seeking his scalp. His vivid imagination was running riot. It made every bush and tree an aboriginal. Shooting an arrow into a bush he shouted, “I gotcha, you bad Indian! I killed ye dead!” until his victory was complete and he ran to share his conquest with his mother.
Painters, while at work on a residence, climbed up and down a tall ladder extending to the roof. When the owner of the house returned home from business he was met by his five-year-old son who, pointing to the ladder, said proudly, “Papa, I climbed to the top of that ladder today.” It was physically impossible for a child of such tender years to accomplish this feat. His statement was not true but the child had not lied. With intense admiration he had watched the painters climb the ladder until in boyish fancy he himself was playing this heroic and dangerous rôle. All day long he had marveled at the feat in which he pictured himself placing the principal part, until his obsession became a conviction. The actual facts photographed themselves in a blur on the poor film of his brain, already impressed with the clear-cut picture of his imagination, until the composite result was a mental image in which fancy predominated. If a lie is the voluntary and conscious perversion of the truth, he did not lie. An untruth is a misstatement of fact due to ignorance or misconception. He was not conscious of a misstatement of fact because he stated the facts as his mental processes recalled them. His inability to distinguish between the real and the unreal resulted in an error for which he was not morally responsible. He related the incident as a fact because his brain, powerfully impressed by the fancy, believed it to be a fact; therefore the boy told it as a fact.
Fancy is a fairy, that can hear,
Ever, the melody of nature’s voice,
And see all lovely visions that she will.
—Frances S. Osgood.
When his mental development advances to a stage where he can differentiate clearly between fact and fancy; when the maturity of his mind enables him to draw clearer distinction between the real and the unreal, when, in a word, imagination is superseded by reason, then such errors will be impossible. His mistake was mental—not moral. Therefore, he was not culpable. I knew a loving mother who washed out her child’s mouth with soap as punishment for a similar “lie.” No graver injustice can be perpetrated by a parent than punishment for such an alleged offense. It should be recognized and accepted as an incident which is natural to mental immaturity. The thought is expressed by Dr. G. Stanley Hall in these words: “Sometimes their fancy is almost a visualization and develops a kind of mythopic faculty which spins clever yarns and suggests a sense, quite as pregnant as Froschmer asserts of all mental activity and of all universe itself, that all their life is imagination.” But I hear a mother, holding up her hands in horror, exclaiming, “I cannot let my child prevaricate! I must punish him or the habit will become fixed.”