ply interested me at the moment. And then
there are all the risks of mnemonic illusion to be taken into account as
well. Thus, my idea of a person, so far even as it is built up on a
basis of direct personal recollection, is essentially a fragmentary and
to some extent a misleading representation.

Nor is this all. My habitual idea of a person is a resultant of forces
of memory conjoined with other forces. Among these are to be reckoned
the influence of illusory perception or insight, my own and that of
others. The amount of misinterpretation of the words and actions of a
single human being during the course of a long acquaintance must be very
considerable. To these must be added the effect of erroneous single
expectations and reconstructions of past experiences, in so far as these
have not been distinctly contradicted and dissipated. All these errors,
connected with single acts of observing or inferring the feelings and
doings of another, have their effect in distorting the subsequent total
representation of the person.

Finally, we must include a more distinct ingredient of active illusion,
namely, all the complex effects of the activity of imagination as led,
not by fact and experience, but by feeling and desire. Our permanent
idea of another reflects all that we have fondly imagined the person
capable of doing, and thus is made up of an ideal as well as a real
actually known personality. And this result of spontaneous imagination
must be taken to include the ideals entertained by others who are likely
to have influenced us by their beliefs.[142]

Enough has probably been said to show how immensely improbable it is
that our permanent cognition of so complex an object as a particular
human being should be at all an accurate representation of the reality,
how much of the erroneous is certain to get mixed up with the true. And
this being so, we may say that our apparently simple direct cognition of
a given person, our assurance of what he is and will continue to be, is
to some extent illusory.

_Illusion of Self-Esteem._

Let us now pass to another case of compound representation, where the
illusory element is still more striking. I refer to the idea of self
which each of us habitually carries about with him. Every man's opinion
of himself, as a whole, is a very complex mental product, in which facts
known by introspection no doubt play a part, but probably only a very
subordinate part. It is obvious, from what h