This variety of illusion is illustrated in the case in which a present feeling or thought is confounded with some inference based on it.  For example, a present thought may, through forgetfulness, be regarded as a new discovery.  Its originality appears to be immediately made known in the very freshness which characterizes it.  Every author probably has undergone the experience of finding that ideas which started up to his mind as fresh creations, were unconscious reminiscences of his own or of somebody else’s ideas.

In the case of present emotional states this liability to confuse the present and the past is far greater.  Here there is something hardly distinguishable from an active illusion of sense-perception.  In this condition of mind a man often says that he has an “intuition” of something supposed to be immediately given in the feeling itself.  For instance, one whose mind is thrilled by the pulsation of a new joy exclaims, “This is the happiest moment of my life,” and the assurance seems to be contained in the very intensity of the feeling itself.  Of course, cool reflection will tell him that what he affirms is merely a belief, the accuracy of which presupposes processes of recollection and judgment, but to the man’s mind at the moment the supremacy of this particular joy is immediately intuited.  And so with the assurance that the present feeling, for example of love, is undying, that it is equal to the most severe trials, and so on.  A man is said to feel at the moment that it is so, though as the facts believed have reference to absent circumstances and events, it is plain that the knowledge is by no means intuitive.

At such times our minds are in a state of pure feeling:  intellectual discrimination and comparison are no longer possible.  In this way our emotions in the moments of their greatest intensity carry away our intellects with them, confusing the region of pure imagination with that of truth and certainty, and even the narrow domain of the present with the vast domain of the past and future.  In this condition differences of present and future may be said to disappear and the energy of the emotion to constitute an immediate assurance of its existence absolutely.[104]

The great region for the illustration of these active illusions is that of the moral and religious life.  With respect to our real motives, our dominant aspirations, and our highest emotional experiences, we are greatly liable to deceive ourselves.  The moralist and the theologian have clearly recognized the possibilities of self-deception in matters of feeling and impulse.  To them it is no mystery that the human heart should mistake the fictitious for the real, the momentary and evanescent for the abiding.  And they have recognized, too, the double bias in these errors, namely, the powerful disposition to exaggerate the intensity and persistence of a present feeling on the one hand, and on the other hand to take a mere wish to feel in a particular way for the actual possession of the feeling.