baby had "told a lie!" For several weeks everything that was said
was subject to the child's severe scrutiny; every slightest mistake
was at once labelled by him as a "lie." Richard said _this_ is
my right hand, that is a lie; Helen said I may not play with the
hammer, mother said I may, so Helen lied; the maid said it was time
to go to bed, but it is only five minutes to seven, so the maid
lied. And he would delight especially in asking the baby brother
leading questions, to trap him into saying lies. This experience did
not result in making Herbert any more scrupulous in his own speech,
for his imagination created interesting and dramatic situations,
which he described with zeal and enthusiasm, for a long time after
he had discovered "lies."

The young child is really incapable of distinguishing between his
dreams and reality on the one hand, and between reality and his
day-dreams or imaginings on the other. A little boy came home from
kindergarten a few days after he had entered, and, when the experience
was still full of novelties to him, he described the workshop: each
little boy had a pair of overalls with the name across the bib in
black letters; there was a little locker for each child, with the name
on the outside; each had his set of tools and his place at the bench.
Day by day he narrated his doings in "school" and reported the
progress he was making with a little "hair-pin box" that he intended
for his aunt's birthday. On the birthday the mother came to the school
to see how the boy was getting on; and she asked about the hair-pin
box which he was now to bring home. It then appeared that there was no
shop, no overalls, no lockers, no tools. The whole story was a
creation of the child's imagination, and all the details he had
invented were real enough to him to be described repeatedly with such
vividness that no one suspected for a moment that it was all a