We habitually approach others with a predisposition to attribute to them our own modes of thinking and feeling.  And this predisposition will be the more powerful, the more desirous we are for sympathy, and for that confirmation of our own views which the reflection of another mind affords.  Thus, when making a new acquaintance, people are in general disposed to project too much of themselves into the person who is the object of inspection.  They intuitively endow him with their own ideas, ways of looking at things, prejudices of sentiment, and so on, and receive something like a shock when later on they find out how different he is from this first hastily formed and largely performed image.

The same thing occurs in the reading of literature, and the appreciation of the arts of expression generally.  We usually approach an author with a predisposition to read our own habits of thought and sentiment into his words.  It is probably a characteristic defect of a good deal of current criticism of remote writers to attribute to them too much of our modern conceptions and aims.  Similarly, we often import our own special feelings into the utterances of the poet and of the musical composer.  That much of this intuition is illusory, may be seen by a little attention to the “intuitions” of different critics.  Two readers of unlike emotional organization will find incompatible modes of feeling in the same poet.  And everybody knows how common it is for musical critics and amateurs to discover quite dissimilar feelings in the same composition.[109]

The effect of this active projection of personal feeling will, of course, be seen most strikingly when there is a certain variety of feeling actually excited at the time in the observer’s mind.  A man who is in a particularly happy mood tends to reflect his exuberant gladness on others.  The lover, in the moment of exalted emotion, reads a response to all his aspirations in his mistress’s eyes.  Again, a man will tend to project his own present ideas into the minds of others, and so imagine that they know what he knows; and this sometimes leads to a comical kind of embarrassment, and even to a betrayal of something which it was the interest of the person to keep to himself.  Once more, in interpreting language, we may sometimes catch ourselves mistaking the meaning, owing to the presence of a certain idea in the mind at the time.  Thus, if I have just been thinking of Comte, and overhear a person exclaim, “I’m positive,” I irresistibly tend, for the moment, to ascribe to him an avowal of discipleship to the great positivist.

Poetic Illusion.

The most remarkable example of this projection of feeling is undoubtedly illustrated in the poetic interpretation of inanimate nature.  The personification of tree, mountain, ocean, and so on, illustrates, no doubt, the effect of association and external suggestion; for there are limits to such personification.  But resemblance and suggestion commonly bear, in this case, but a small proportion to active constructive imagination.  One might, perhaps, call this kind of projection the hallucination of insight, since there is nothing objective corresponding to the interpretative image.