In this review of the types of deception I have made no mention of
such devices as the gaining of one's confidence for selfish ends,
preying upon ignorance or fear, acting the friend while at heart
the enemy, planned connivance and skilful plotting, together with
the whole outfit of insincerity, villainy, and crime. It is not
that these are without interest or are unrelated to the several
types of deception above considered, but that they are too complex
and too heterogeneous to be capable of ready or rigid analysis.
When deception becomes an art of life, consciously planned and
craftily executed, there must be acting and subterfuge and evasion
to maintain the appearance of sincerity. The psychology of the
processes therein concerned is almost coincident with the range of
social, intellectual, and emotional influences. Complex as these
operations may be, they have, in common with the less intricate forms
of deception, the attempt to parallel the conditions underlying the
logical inferences which it is desired to induce. If we add this
great class of deceptions to those already enumerated, we may perhaps
realize how vast is its domain, and how long and sad must be the
chapter that records the history of human error.
Ethics is so closely related to psychology--right knowing to right
doing--that a brief _hæc fabula docet_ by way of summary may not be
out of place. We find, first, a class of sense-deceptions which are
due to the nature of our sense-endowment, and deceive only so long as
their true character remains unknown. These are neither pernicious
nor difficult to correct. Next comes a class of deceptions that
deceive because we are ignorant of the possibilities of technical
devices, such as those used in legerdemain, and pronounce upon the
possibility or impossibility of a certain explanation in advance
of complete knowledge. But still another class, and that the most
dangerous and insidious, are the deceptions in which self-deception
plays the leading rôle. The only safeguard here is a preventive; the
thorough infusion of sound habits of thought, a full recognition of
the conditions under which the testimony of consciousness becomes
dubious, an appreciation of the true value of objective scientific
evidence, and an inoculation against the evils of contagion by an
independent, unprejudiced, logical schooling. When once the evil
spirit of self-deception, fed by the fire of contagion and emotional
excitement, begins to spread, reason has little control. As Tyndall
tells us, such "victims like to believe, and they do not like to
be undeceived. Science is perfectly powerless in the presence
of this frame of mind.... It [science] keeps down the weed of
superstition, not by logic, but by slowly rendering the mental soil
unfit for cultivation." With the spread of an education that fosters
independence and self-reliance, with the growth of the capacity to
profit by the experiences of others, with the recognition of the
technical requisites that alone qualify one for a judgment in this
or that field, with a knowledge of the possibilities of deception
and of the psychological processes by which error is propagated, the
soil upon which superstitions, psychic delusions, mental epidemics,
or senseless fads are likely to flourish will gradually be rendered
unfit.