Here then, again, there seems to be room for illusion to arise.  Even in the case of a recent past event, directly made known by present objective signs, the mind is liable to err just as in the case of forecasting an immediately approaching event.  And such error has all the force of an illusion:  its contradiction is almost as great a shock as that of a recollection.  When, for example, I enter my house, and see a friend’s card lying on the table, I so vividly represent to myself the recent call of my friend, that when I learn the card is an old one which has accidentally been put on the table, I experience a sense of disillusion very similar to that which attends a contradicted perception.  The early crude stages of physical science abundantly illustrate the genesis of such illusions.

It may be added that if there be any feeling present in the mind at the time, the barest suggestion of something having happened will suffice to produce the immediate assurance.  Thus, an angry person is apt to hastily accuse another of having done certain things on next to no evidence.  The love of the marvellous seems to have played a conspicuous part in building up and sustaining the fanciful hypotheses which mark the dawn of physical science.

Verbal suggestion is a common mode of producing this semblance of a recollected event.  By means of the narrative style, it vividly suggests the idea that the events described belong to the past, and excites the imagination to a retrospective construction of them as though they were remembered events.  Hence the power of works of fiction on the ordinary mind.  Even when there is no approach to an illusion of perception, or to one of memory in the strict sense, the reading of a work of fiction begets at the moment a retrospective belief that has a certain resemblance to a recollection.

All such illusions as those just illustrated, if not afterwards corrected, tend to harden into yet more distinctly “intuitive” errors.  Thus, for example, one of the crude geological hypotheses, of which Sir Charles Lyell tells us,[141] would, by the mere fact of being kept before the mind, tend to petrify into a hard fixed belief.  And this process of hardening is seen strikingly illustrated in the case of traditional errors, especially when these fall in with our own emotional propensities.  Our habitual representations of the remote historical past are liable to much the same kind of error as our recollections of early personal experience.  The wrong statements of others and the promptings of our own fancies may lead in the first instance to a filling up of the remote past with purely imaginary shapes.  Afterwards the particular origin of the belief is forgotten, and the assurance assumes the aspect of a perfectly intuitive conviction.  The hoary traditional myths respecting the golden age, and so on, and the persistent errors of historians under the sway of a strong emotional bias, illustrate such illusions.