Thus far I have assumed that the date of the future event is a matter which might be known.  It is, however, obvious, from the very nature of knowledge with respect to the future, that we may sometimes be certain of a thing happening to us without knowing with any degree of definiteness when it will happen.  In the case of these temporally undefined expectations, the law already expounded holds good that all vividness of representation tends to lend the things represented an appearance of approaching events.  On the other hand, there are some events, such as our own death, which our instinctive feelings tend to banish to a region so remote as hardly to be realized at all.

So much with respect to errors in the localizing of future events.

In the second place, a habit of imagining a future event or group of events will give play to those forces which tend to transform a mental image.  In other words, the habitual indulgence of a certain anticipation tends to an illusory view, not only of the “when?” but also of the “how?” of the future event.  These transformations, due to subtle processes of emotion and intellect, and reflecting the present habits of these, exactly resemble those by which a remembered event becomes gradually transformed.  Thus, we carry on our present habits of thought and feeling into the remote future, foolishly imagining that at a distant period of life, or in greatly altered circumstances, we shall desire and aim at the same things as now in our existing circumstances.  In close connection with this forward projection of our present selves, there betrays itself a tendency to look on future events as answering to our present desires and aspirations.  In this way, we are wont to soften, beautify, and idealize the future, marking it off from the hard matter-of-fact present.

The less like the future experience to our past experience, or the more remote the time anticipated, the greater the scope for such imaginative transformation.  And from this stage of fanciful transformation of a future reality to the complete imaginative creation of such a reality, the step is but a small one.  Here we reach the full development of illusory expectation, that which corresponds to hallucination in the region of sense-perception.

In order to understand these extreme forms of illusory expectation, it will be necessary to say something more about the relation of imagination to anticipation in general.  There are, I conceive, good reasons for saying that any kind of vivid imagination tends to pass into a semblance of an expectation of a coming personal experience, or an event that is about to happen within the sphere of our own observation.  It has long been recognized by writers, among whom I may mention Dugald Stewart, that to distinctly imagine an event or object is to feel for the moment a degree of belief in the corresponding reality.  Now, I have already said that expectation is probably a more