The imaginative and poetic mind is continually on the look out for hints of life, consciousness, and emotion in nature.  It finds a certain kind of satisfaction in this half-illusory, dream-like transformation of nature.  The deepest ground of this tendency must probably be looked for in the primitive ideas of the race, and the transmission by inheritance of the effect of its firmly fixed habits of mind.  The undisciplined mind of early man, incapable of distinguishing the object of perception from the product of spontaneous imagination, and taking his own double existence as the type of all existence, actually saw the stream, the ocean, and the mountain as living beings; and so firmly rooted is this way of regarding objects, that even our scientifically trained minds find it a relief to relapse occasionally into it.[110]

While there is this general imaginative disposition in the poetic mind to endow nature with life and consciousness, there are special tendencies to project the individual feelings into objects.  Every imaginative mind looks for reflections of its own deepest feelings in the world about it.  The lonely embittered heart, craving for sympathy, which he cannot meet with in his fellow-man, finds traces of it in the sighing of the trees or the moaning of the sad sea-wave.  Our Poet Laureate, in his great elegy, has abundantly illustrated this impulse of the imagination to reflect its own emotional colouring on to inanimate things:  for example in the lines—­

    “The wild unrest that lives in woe
  Would dote and pore on yonder cloud
  That rises upward always higher,
     And onward drags a labouring breast,
     And topples round the dreary west,
  A looming bastion fringed with fire.”

So far I have been considering active illusions of insight as arising through the play of the impulse of the individual mind to project its feelings outwards, or to see their reflections in external things.  I must now add that active illusion may be due to causes similar to those which we have seen to operate in the sphere of illusory perception and introspection.  That is to say, there may be a disposition, permanent or temporary, to ascribe a certain kind of feeling to others in accordance with our wishes, fears, and so on.

To give an illustration of the permanent causes, it is well known that a conceited man will be disposed to attribute admiration of himself to others.  On the other hand, a shy, timid person will be prone to read into other minds the opposite kind of feeling.

Coming to temporary forces, we find that any expectation to meet with a particular kind of mental trait in a new acquaintance will dispose the observer hastily and erroneously to attribute corresponding feelings to the person.  And if this expectation springs out of a present feeling, the bias to illusory insight is still more powerful.  For example, a child that fears its parent’s displeasure will be prone to misinterpret the parent’s words and actions, colouring them according to its fears.  So an angry man, strongly desirous of making out that a person has injured him, will be disposed to see signs of conscious guilt in this person’s looks or words.  Similarly, a lover will read fine thoughts or sentiments into the mind of his mistress under the influence of a strong wish to admire.