hropist, and the
philanthropic vindicator of his species, illustrate a like diversity of
the psychological conditions of belief.

Finally, illusion may enter into that still wider collection of beliefs
which make up our ordinary views of life and the world as a whole. Here
there reflect themselves in the plainest manner the accidents of our
individual experience and the peculiar errors to which our intellectual
and emotional conformation disposes us. The world is for us what we feel
it to be; and we feel it to be the cause of our particular emotional
experience. Just as we have found that our environment helps to
determine our idea of self and personal continuity, so, conversely, our
inner experience, our remembered or imagined joys and sorrows throw a
reflection on the outer world, giving it its degree of worth. Hence the
contradictory, and consequently to some extent at least illusory, views
of the optimist and the pessimist, "intuitions" which, I have tried to
show elsewhere, are connected with deeply rooted habits of feeling, and
are antecedent to all reasoned philosophic systems.

If proof were yet wanted that these wide-embracing beliefs may to some
extent be illusory, it would be found in the fact that they can be
distinctly coloured by a temporary mood or mental tone. As I have more
than once had occasion to remark, a feeling when present tends to colour
all the ideas of the time. And when out of sorts, moody, and
discontented, a man is prone to find a large objective cause of his
dissatisfaction in a world out of joint and not moving to his mind.

It is evident that all the permanent beliefs touched on in this chapter
must constitute powerful predispositions with respect to any particular
act of perception, insight, introspection, or recollection. In other
words, these persistent beliefs, so far as individual or personal, are
but another name for those fixed habits of mind which, in the case of
each one of us, constitute our intellectual bias, and the source of the
error known as personal equation. And it may be added that, just as
these erroneous beliefs existing in the shape of fixed prejudices
constitute a bias to new error, so they act as powerful resisting forces
in relation to new truth and the correction of error.

In comparing these illusions of belief with those of perception and
memory, we cannot fail to notice their greater compass or range, in
other words, the greater extent of the region of fact