n. Indeed, the anticipation of such new experiences more often
resembles an instantaneous imaginative intuition than a process of
conscious transition from old experiences. In the case of these
expectations, then, there would clearly seem to be room for illusion
from the first.

But even supposing that the errors connected with the first formation of
an expectation cannot strictly be called illusory, we may see that such
simple expectation will, in certain cases, tend to grow into something
quite indistinguishable from illusion. I refer to expectations of
_remote_ events which allow of frequent renewal. Even supposing the
expectation to have originated from some rational source, as from a
conscious inference from past experience, or from the acceptance of
somebody's statement, the very habit of cherishing the anticipation
tends to invest it with an automatic self-sufficient character. To all
intents and purposes the prevision becomes intuitive, by which I mean
that the mind is at the time immediately certain that something is going
to happen, without needing to fall back on memory or reflection. This
being so, whenever the initial process of inference or quasi-inference
happens to have been bad, an illusory expectation may arise. In other
words, the force of repetition and habit tends to harden what may, in
its initial form, have resembled a kind of fallacy into an illusion.

And now let us proceed further. When a permanent expectation is thus
formed, there arises the possibility of processes which favour illusion
precisely analogous to those which we have studied in the case of
memory.

In the first place, the habit of imagining a future event is attended
with a considerable amount of illusion as to time or remoteness. After
what has been said respecting the conditions of such error in the case
of memory, a very few words will suffice here.

It is clear, then, in the first place, that the mind will tend to
shorten any period of future time, and so to antedate, so to speak, a
given event, in so far as the imagination is able clearly and easily to
run over its probable experiences. From this it follows that repeated
forecastings of series of events, by facilitating the imaginative
process, tend to beget an illusory appearance of contraction in the time
anticipated. Moreover, since in anticipation so much of each division of
the future time-line is unknown, it is obviously easy for the expectant
imagination to skip ov