These, even more than the pseudomaniac cases
mentioned later, grow rankly in those with criminal predispositions.
The lie heroic is often justified as a means of noble ends. Youth has
an instinct which is wholesome for viewing moral situations as wholes.
Callow casualists are fond of declaring that it would be a duty to
state that their mother was out when she was in, if it would save her
life, although they perhaps would not lie to save their own. A doctor,
many suggested, might tell an overanxious patient or friend that there
was hope, saving his conscience perhaps by reflecting that there was
hope, although they had it while he had none. The end at first in such
cases may be very noble and the fib or quibble very petty, but worse
lies for meaner objects may follow. Youth often describes such
situations with exhilaration as if there were a feeling of easement
from the monotonous and tedious obligation of rigorous literal
veracity, and here mentors are liable to become nervous and err. The
youth who really gets interested in the conflict of duties may
reverently be referred to the inner lie of his own conscience, the
need of keeping which as a private tribunal is now apparent.
Many adolescents become craven literalists and distinctly morbid and
pseudophobiac, regarding every deviation from scrupulously literal
truth as alike heinous; and many systematized palliatives and
casuistic word-splittings, methods of whispering or silently
interpolating the words "not," "perhaps," or "I think," sometimes said
over hundreds of times to neutralize the guilt of intended or
unintended falsehoods, appear in our records as a sad product of bad
methods.
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