it is one which has the minimum degree of consciousness.

It might still be urged that the mind passes from the _present_ facts as
signs, and so still performs a kind of reasoning process. This is, no
doubt, true, and differentiates expectation from perception, in which
there is no conscious transition from the presented to the represented.
Still I take it that this is only a process of reasoning in so far as
the sign is consciously generalized, and this is certainly not true of
early expectations, or even of any expectations in a wholly uncultivated
mind.

For these reasons I think that any errors involved in such an
anticipation may, without much forcing, be brought under our definition
of illusion. When due altogether to the immediate force of suggestion in
a present object or event, and not involving any conscious transition
from past to future, or from general truth to particular instance, these
errors appear to me to have more of the character of illusions than of
that of fallacies.

Much the same thing may be said about the vivid anticipations of a
familiar kind of experience called up by a clear and consecutive verbal
suggestion. When a man, even with an apparent air of playfulness, tells
me that something is going to happen, and gives a consistent consecutive
account of this, I have an anticipation which is not consciously
grounded on any past experience of the value of human testimony in
general, or of this person's testimony in particular, but which is
instantaneous and quasi-immediate. Consequently, any error connected
with the mental act approximates to an illusion.

So far I have supposed that the anticipated event is a recurring one,
that is to say, a kind of experience which has already become familiar
to us. This, however, holds good only of a very few of our experiences.
Our life changes as it progresses, both outwardly and inwardly. Many of
our anticipations, when first formed, involve much more than a
reproduction of a past experience, namely, a complex act of constructive
imagination. Our representations of these untried experiences, as, for
example, those connected with a new set of circumstances, a new social
condition, a new mode of occupation, and so on, are clearly at the first
far from simple processes of inference from the past. They are put
together by the aid of many fragmentary images, restored by distinct
threads of association, yet by a process so rapid as to appear like an
intuitio