We will now pass to the consideration of other illusions of introspection more analogous to what I have called the active illusions of perception.  In our examination of these we found that a pure representation may under certain circumstances simulate the appearance of a presentation, that a mental image may approximate to a sense-impression.  In the case of the internal feelings this liability shows itself in a still more striking form.

The higher feelings or emotions are distinguished from the simple sense-feelings in being largely representative.  Thus, a feeling of contentment at any moment, though no doubt conditioned by the bodily state and the character of the organic sensations or coenaesthesis, commonly depends for the most part on intellectual representations of external circumstances or relations, and may be called an ideal foretaste of actual satisfactions, such as the pleasures of success, of companionship, and so on.  This being so, it is easy for imagination to call up a semblance of these higher feelings.  Since they depend largely on representation, a mere act of representation may suffice to excite a degree of the feeling hardly distinguishable from the actual one.  Thus, to imagine myself as contented is really to see myself at the moment as actually contented.  Again, the actor, though, as we shall see by-and-by, he does not feel all that the spectator is apt to attribute to him, tends, when vividly representing to himself a particular shade of feeling, to regard himself as actually feeling in this way.  Thus, it is said of Garrick, that when acting Richard III., he felt himself for the moment to be a villain.

We should expect from all this that in the act of introspection the mind is apt, within certain limits, to find what it is prepared to find.  And since there is in these acts often a distinct wish to detect some particular feeling, we can see how easy it must be for a man through bias and a wrong focussing of the attention to deceive himself up to a certain point with respect to the actual contents of his mind.

Let us examine one of these active illusions a little more fully.  It would at first sight seem to be a perfectly simple thing to determine at any given moment whether we are enjoying ourselves, whether our emotional condition rises above the pleasure-threshold or point of indifference and takes on a positive hue of the agreeable or pleasurable.  Yet there is good reason for supposing that people not unfrequently deceive themselves on this matter.  It is, perhaps, hardly an exaggeration to say that most of us are capable of imagining that we are having enjoyment when we conform to the temporary fashion of social amusement.  It has been cynically observed that people go into society less in order to be happy than to seem so, and one may add that in this semblance of enjoyment they may, provided they are not blase, deceive themselves as well as others.  The expectation of enjoyment, the knowledge that the occasion is intended to bring about this result, the recognition of the external signs of enjoyment in others—­all this may serve to blind a man in the earlier stages of social amusement to his actual mental condition.