imple beliefs.

A. _Simple Illusory Belief: Expectation._

It will be well to begin our inquiry by examining the errors connected
with simple expectations, so far as these come under our definition of
illusion. And here, following our usual practice, we may set out with a
very brief account of the nature of the intellectual process in its
correct form. For this purpose we shall do well to take a complete or
definite anticipation of an event as our type.[136]

The ability of the mind to move forward, forecasting an order of events
in time, is clearly very similar to its power of recalling events. Each
depends on the capability of imagination to represent a sequence of
events or experiences. The difference between the two processes is that
in anticipation the imagination setting out from the present traces the
succession of experiences in their actual order, and not in the reverse
order. It would thus appear to be a more natural and easy process than
recollection, and observation bears out this conclusion. Any object
present to perception which is associated with antecedents and
consequents with the same degree of cohesion, calls up its consequents
rather than its antecedents. The spectacle of the rising of the sun
carries the mind much more forcibly forwards to the advancing morning
than backwards to the receding night. And there is good reason to
suppose that in the order of mental development the power of distinctly
expecting an event precedes that of distinctly recollecting one. Thus,
in the case of the infant mind, as of the animal intelligence, the
presence of signs of coming events, as the preparation of food, seems to
excite distinct and vivid expectation.[137]

As a mode of assurance, expectation is clearly marked off from memory,
and is not explainable by means of this. It is a fundamentally distinct
kind of conviction. So far as we are capable of analyzing it, we may say
that its peculiarity is its essentially active character. To expect a
thing is to have stirred the active impulses, including the powers of
attention; it is to be on the alert for it, to have the attention
already focussed for it, and to begin to rehearse the actions which the
actual happening of the event--for example, the approach of a welcome
object--would excite. It thus stands in marked contrast to memory, which
is a passive attitude of mind, becoming active only when it gives rise
to the expectation of a recurrence of the event.[138]