uggests
the idea that the events described belong to the past, and excites the
imagination to a retrospective construction of them as though they were
remembered events. Hence the power of works of fiction on the ordinary
mind. Even when there is no approach to an illusion of perception, or to
one of memory in the strict sense, the reading of a work of fiction
begets at the moment a retrospective belief that has a certain
resemblance to a recollection.

All such illusions as those just illustrated, if not afterwards
corrected, tend to harden into yet more distinctly "intuitive" errors.
Thus, for example, one of the crude geological hypotheses, of which Sir
Charles Lyell tells us,[141] would, by the mere fact of being kept
before the mind, tend to petrify into a hard fixed belief. And this
process of hardening is seen strikingly illustrated in the case of
traditional errors, especially when these fall in with our own emotional
propensities. Our habitual representations of the remote historical past
are liable to much the same kind of error as our recollections of early
personal experience. The wrong statements of others and the promptings
of our own fancies may lead in the first instance to a filling up of the
remote past with purely imaginary shapes. Afterwards the particular
origin of the belief is forgotten, and the assurance assumes the aspect
of a perfectly intuitive conviction. The hoary traditional myths
respecting the golden age, and so on, and the persistent errors of
historians under the sway of a strong emotional bias, illustrate such
illusions.

So much as to simple illusions of belief, or such as involve single
representations only. Let us now pass to compound illusions, which
involve a complex group of representations.

B. _Compound Illusory Belief._

A familiar example of a compound belief is the belief in a permanent or
persistent individual object of a certain character. Such an idea,
whatever its whole meaning may be--and this is a disputed point in
philosophy--certainly seems to include a number of particular
representations, corresponding to direct personal recollections, to the
recollections of others, and to numerous anticipations of ourselves and
of others. And if the object be a living creature endowed with feelings,
our idea of it will contain, in addition to these represented
perceptions of ourselves or of others, a series of represented insights,
namely, such as correspond to the inner e