as related to ourselves (forming the natural
disposition to enjoy flattery), and finally into our wild dreams as to
our future achievements. It is thus the principal root of that gigantic
illusion of self-conceit, which has long been recognized by practical
sense as one of the greatest obstacles to social action; and by art as
one of the most ludicrous manifestations of human weakness.

If there are all these openings for error in the beliefs we go on
entertaining respecting individual things, including ourselves, there
must be a yet larger number of such openings in those still more
compound beliefs which we habitually hold respecting collections or
classes of things. A single illusion of perception or of memory may
suffice to give rise to a wholly illusory belief in a class of objects,
for example, ghosts. The superstitious beliefs of mankind abundantly
illustrate this complexity of the sources of error. And in the case of
our every-day beliefs respecting real classes of objects, these sources
contribute a considerable quota of error. We may again see this by
examining our ordinary beliefs respecting our fellow-men.

A moment's consideration will show that our prevailing views respecting
any section of mankind, say our fellow-countrymen, or mankind at large,
correspond at best to a very loose process of reasoning. The accidents
of our personal experience and opportunities of observation, the
traditions which coloured our first ideas, the influence of our dominant
feelings in selecting for attention and retention certain aspects of the
complex object, and in idealizing this object,--these sources of passive
and active illusion, must, to say the least, have had as much to do with
our present solidified and seemingly "intuitive" knowledge as anything
that can be called the exercise of individual judgment and reasoning
power.

The force of this observation and the proof that such widely generalized
beliefs are in part illusory, is seen in the fact that men of unlike
experience and unlike temperament form such utterly dissimilar views of
the same object. Thus, as Mr. Spencer has shown,[144] in looking at
things national there may be not only a powerful patriotic bias at work
in the case of the vulgar Philistine, but also a distinctly
anti-patriotic bias in the case of the over-fastidious seeker after
culture. And I need hardly add that the different estimates of mankind
held with equal assurance by the cynic, the misant