Adolescence is the normal time of emancipation from
the parental roof, when youth seeks to set up a home of its own, but
the apprentice to life must wander far and long enough to find the
best habitat in which to set up for himself. This is the spring season
of emigration; and it should be an indispensable part of every life
curriculum, just before settlement, to travel far and wide, if
resources and inclination permit. But this stage should end in wisely
chosen settlement where the young life can be independently developed,
and that with more complacency and satisfaction because the place has
been wisely chosen on the basis of a wide comparison. The chronic
vagrant has simply failed to develop the reductives of this normal
stage.
Crime is cryptogamous and flourishes in concealment, so that not only
does falsehood facilitate it, but certain types of lies often cause
and are caused by it. The beginning of wisdom in treatment is to
discriminate between good and bad lies. My own study[10] of the lies
of 300 normal children, by a method carefully devised in order to
avoid all indelicacy to the childish consciousness, suggested the
following distinct species of lies. It is often a well-marked epoch
when the young child first learns that it can imagine and state things
that have no objective counterpart in its life, and there is often a
weird intoxication when some absurd and monstrous statement is made,
while the first sensation of a deliberate break with truth causes a
real excitement which is often the birth pang of the imagination.
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