misrepresented.
Even if they are less forcible and irresistible than these errors, they
clearly make up for this by the area which they cover.

Another thing to be observed with respect to these comprehensive beliefs
is that where, as here, so many co-operant conditions are at work, the
whole amount of common objective agreement is greatly reduced. In other
words, individual peculiarities of intellectual conformation, emotional
temperament, and experience have a far wider scope for their influence
in these beliefs than they have in the case of presentative cognitions.
At the same time, it is noteworthy that error much more rapidly
propagates itself here than in the case of our perceptions or
recollections. As we have seen, these beliefs all include much more than
the results of the individual's own experience. They offer a large field
for the influence of personal ascendency, of the contagion of sympathy,
and of authority and tradition. As a consequence of this, the illusions
of belief are likely to be far more persistent than those of perception
or of memory; for not only do they lose that salutary process of
correction which comparison with the experience of others affords, but
they may even be strengthened and upheld to some extent by such social
influences.

And here the question might seem to obtrude itself, whether, in relation
to such a fluctuating mass of belief as that just reviewed, in which
there appears to be so little common agreement, we can correctly speak
of anything as objectively determinable. If illusion and error as a
whole are defined by a reference to what is commonly held true and
certain, what, it may be asked, becomes of the so-called illusions of
belief?

This question will have to be fully dealt with in the following chapter.
Here it may be sufficient to remark that amid all this apparent
deviation of belief from a common standard of truth, there is a clear
tendency to a rational consensus. Thought, by disengaging what is really
matter of permanent and common cognition, both in the individual and
still more in the class,[145] and fixing this quantum of common
cognition in the shape of accurate definitions and universal
propositions, is ever fighting against and restraining the impulses of
individual imagination towards dissociation and isolation of belief. And
this same process of scientific control of belief is ever tending to
correct widespread traditional forms of error, and to erect a