veries, which will happen after my
personal experience is at an end. Once more, I can believe in something
going on now at some distant and even inaccessible point of the
universe, and this appears to involve a conditional expectation, and to
mean that I am certain that I or anybody else would see the phenomenon,
if we could at this moment be transported to the spot.

All such previsions are supposed to be formed by a process of inference
from personal experience, including the trustworthiness of testimony.
Even allowing, however, that this was so in the first stages of the
belief, it is plain that, by dint of frequent renewal, the expectation
would soon cease to be a process of inference, and acquire an apparently
self-evident character. This being so, if the expectation is not
adequately grounded to start with, it is very likely to develop into an
illusion. And it is to be added that these permanent anticipations may
have their origin much more in our own wishes or emotional promptings
than in fact and experience. The mind undisciplined by scientific
training is wont to entertain numerous beliefs of this sort respecting
what is now going on in unvisited parts of the world, or what will
happen hereafter in the distant future. The remote, and therefore
obscure, in space and in time has always been the favourite region for
the projection of pleasant fancies.

Once more, besides these oblique kinds of expectation, I may form other
seemingly simple beliefs, to which the term expectation seems less
clearly applicable. Thus, on waking in the morning and finding the
ground covered with snow, my imagination moves backwards, as in the
process of memory, and realizes the spectacle of the softly falling
snow-flakes in the hours of the night. The oral communication of others'
experience, including the traditions of the race, enables me to set out
from any present point of time, and reconstruct complex chains of
experience of vast length lying beyond the bounds of my own personal
recollection.

I need not here discuss what the exact nature of such beliefs is. J.S.
Mill identifies them with expectations. Thus, according to him, my
belief in the nocturnal snowstorm is the assurance that I should have
seen it had I waited up during the night. So my belief in Cicero's
oratory resolves itself into the conviction that I should have heard
Cicero under certain conditions of time and place, which is identical
with my expectation that I s