xperience. No general instructions
can do any thing more than to offer the suggestion, and to show how a
beginning is to be made.

CHAPTER XVI.

TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD.

The duty of telling the truth seems to us, until we have devoted special
consideration to the subject, the most simple thing in the world, both to
understand and to perform; and when we find young children disregarding it
we are surprised and shocked, and often imagine that it indicates something
peculiar and abnormal in the moral sense of the offender. A little
reflection, however, will show us how very different the state of the case
really is. What do we mean by the obligation resting upon us to tell the
truth? It is simply, in general terms, that it is our duty to make our
statements correspond with the realities which they purport to express.
This is, no doubt, our duty, as a general rule, but there are so many
exceptions to this rule, and the principles on which the admissibility
of the exceptions depend are so complicated and so abstruse, that it is
wonderful that children learn to make the necessary distinctions as soon as
they do.

_Natural Guidance to the Duty of telling the Truth_.

The child, when he first acquires the art of using and understanding
language, is filled with wonder and pleasure to find that he can represent
external objects that he observes, and also ideas passing through his mind,
by means of sounds formed by his organs of speech. Such sounds, he finds,
have both these powers--that is, they can represent realities or fancies.
Thus, when he utters the sounds _I see a bird_, they may denote either a
mere conception in his mind, or an outward actuality. How is he possibly to
know, by any instinct, or intuition, or moral sense when it is right for
him to use them as representations of a mere idea, and when it is wrong for
him to use them, unless they correspond with some actual reality?

The fact that vivid images or conceptions may be awakened in his mind by
the mere hearing of certain sounds made by himself or another is something
strange and wonderful to him; and though he comes to his consciousness of
this susceptibility by degrees, it is still, while he is acquiring it, and
extending the scope and range of it, a source of continual pleasure to him.
The necessity of any correspondence of these words, and of the images which
they excite, with actual realities, is a necessity which arises from the
relations of man t