lves an
external self which becomes the object of visual perception, it is
probably because we isolate in imagination the objective aspect of our
personality from the other and subjective aspect. It is not at all
unlikely that the several confusions of self touched on in this chapter
have had something to do with the genesis of the various historical
theories of a transformed existence, as, for example, the celebrated
doctrine of metempsychosis.

CHAPTER XI.

ILLUSIONS OF BELIEF.

Our knowledge is commonly said to consist of two large
varieties--Presentative and Representative. Representative knowledge,
again, falls into two chief divisions. The first of these is Memory,
which, though not primary or original, like presentative knowledge, is
still regarded as directly or intuitively certain. The second division
consists of all other representative knowledge besides memory,
including, among other varieties, our anticipations of the future, our
knowledge of others' past experience, and our general knowledge about
things. There is no one term which exactly hits off this large sphere of
cognition: I propose to call it Belief. I am aware that this is by no
means a perfect word for my purpose, since, on the one hand, it suggests
that every form of this knowledge must be less certain than presentative
or mnemonic knowledge, which cannot be assumed; and since, on the other
hand, the word is so useful a one in psychology, for the purpose of
marking off the subjective fact of assurance in all kinds of cognition.
Nevertheless, I know not what better one I could select in order to
make my classification answer as closely as a scientific treatment will
allow to the deeply fixed distinctions of popular psychology.

It might at first seem as if perception, introspection, and memory must
exhaust all that is meant by immediate, or self-evident, knowledge, and
as if what I have here called belief must be uniformly mediate,
derivate, or inferred knowledge. The apprehension of something now
present to the mind, externally or internally, and the reapprehension
through the process of memory of what was once so apprehended, might
appear to be the whole of what can by any stretch of language be called
direct cognition of things. This at least would seem to follow from the
empirical theory of knowledge, which regards perception and memory as
the ground or logical source of all other forms of knowledge.

And even if we suppose, with