image in his mind of giving her half of it, but finally concludes not to do
so, and eats it all himself.

When at length he comes in, his mother accidentally asks him some question
about the cake, and he says he gave half of it to his sister. His mother
seems much pleased. He knew that she would be pleased. He said it, in fact,
on purpose to please her. The words represented no actual reality, but only
a thought passing through his mind, and he spoke, in a certain sense, for
the purpose of giving his mother pleasure. The case corresponds in all
these particulars with that of his mother's statement in respect to her
being once a little boy and living by herself. Those words were spoken by
her to give him pleasure, and he said what he did to give her pleasure.
To give her pleasure! the reader will perhaps say, with some surprise,
thinking that to assign such a motive as that is not, by any means, putting
a fair and proper construction upon the boy's act. His design was, it will
be said, to shield himself from censure, or to procure undeserved praise.
And it is, no doubt, true that, on a nice analysis of the motives of the
act, such as we, in our maturity, can easily make, we shall find that
design obscurely mingled with them. But the child does not analyze. He can
not. He does not look forward to ultimate ends, or look for the hidden
springs that lie concealed among the complicated combinations of impulses
which animate him. In the case that we are supposing, all that we can
reasonably believe to be present to his mind is a kind of instinctive
feeling that for him to say that he ate the cake all himself would bring a
frown, or at least a look of pain and distress, to his mother's face, and
perhaps words of displeasure for him; while, if he says that he gave half
to his sister, she will look pleased and happy. This is as far as he sees.
And he may be of such an age, and his mental organs may be in so embryonic
a condition, that it is as far as he ought to be expected to look; so that,
as the case presents itself to his mind in respect to the impulse which at
the moment prompts him to act, he said what he did from a desire to give
his mother pleasure, and not pain. As to the secret motive, which might
have been his ultimate end, _that_ lay too deeply concealed for him to
be conscious of it. And we ourselves too often act from the influence
of hidden impulses of selfishness, the existence of which we are wholly
unconscious of,