ng objects, that even our scientifically trained minds
find it a relief to relapse occasionally into it.[110]

While there is this general imaginative disposition in the poetic mind
to endow nature with life and consciousness, there are special
tendencies to project the individual feelings into objects. Every
imaginative mind looks for reflections of its own deepest feelings in
the world about it. The lonely embittered heart, craving for sympathy,
which he cannot meet with in his fellow-man, finds traces of it in the
sighing of the trees or the moaning of the sad sea-wave. Our Poet
Laureate, in his great elegy, has abundantly illustrated this impulse of
the imagination to reflect its own emotional colouring on to inanimate
things: for example in the lines--

"The wild unrest that lives in woe
Would dote and pore on yonder cloud
That rises upward always higher,
And onward drags a labouring breast,
And topples round the dreary west,
A looming bastion fringed with fire."

So far I have been considering active illusions of insight as arising
through the play of the impulse of the individual mind to project its
feelings outwards, or to see their reflections in external things. I
must now add that active illusion may be due to causes similar to those
which we have seen to operate in the sphere of illusory perception and
introspection. That is to say, there may be a disposition, permanent or
temporary, to ascribe a certain kind of feeling to others in accordance
with our wishes, fears, and so on.

To give an illustration of the permanent causes, it is well known that a
conceited man will be disposed to attribute admiration of himself to
others. On the other hand, a shy, timid person will be prone to read
into other minds the opposite kind of feeling.

Coming to temporary forces, we find that any expectation to meet with a
particular kind of mental trait in a new acquaintance will dispose the
observer hastily and erroneously to attribute corresponding feelings to
the person. And if this expectation springs out of a present feeling,
the bias to illusory insight is still more powerful. For example, a
child that fears its parent's displeasure will be prone to misinterpret
the parent's words and actions, colouring them according to its fears.
So an angry man, strongly desirous of making out that a person has
injured him, will be disposed to see signs of conscious guilt in this
person's looks or words. Sim