has our direct observation of the person been very limited, even that which we have been able to see has not been perfectly mirrored in our memory.  It has already been remarked that recollection is a selective process, and this truth is strikingly illustrated in the growth of our enduring representations of things.  What stamps itself on my memory is what surprised me or what deeply interested me at the moment.  And then there are all the risks of mnemonic illusion to be taken into account as well.  Thus, my idea of a person, so far even as it is built up on a basis of direct personal recollection, is essentially a fragmentary and to some extent a misleading representation.

Nor is this all.  My habitual idea of a person is a resultant of forces of memory conjoined with other forces.  Among these are to be reckoned the influence of illusory perception or insight, my own and that of others.  The amount of misinterpretation of the words and actions of a single human being during the course of a long acquaintance must be very considerable.  To these must be added the effect of erroneous single expectations and reconstructions of past experiences, in so far as these have not been distinctly contradicted and dissipated.  All these errors, connected with single acts of observing or inferring the feelings and doings of another, have their effect in distorting the subsequent total representation of the person.

Finally, we must include a more distinct ingredient of active illusion, namely, all the complex effects of the activity of imagination as led, not by fact and experience, but by feeling and desire.  Our permanent idea of another reflects all that we have fondly imagined the person capable of doing, and thus is made up of an ideal as well as a real actually known personality.  And this result of spontaneous imagination must be taken to include the ideals entertained by others who are likely to have influenced us by their beliefs.[142]

Enough has probably been said to show how immensely improbable it is that our permanent cognition of so complex an object as a particular human being should be at all an accurate representation of the reality, how much of the erroneous is certain to get mixed up with the true.  And this being so, we may say that our apparently simple direct cognition of a given person, our assurance of what he is and will continue to be, is to some extent illusory.

Illusion of Self-Esteem.

Let us now pass to another case of compound representation, where the illusory element is still more striking.  I refer to the idea of self which each of us habitually carries about with him.  Every man’s opinion of himself, as a whole, is a very complex mental product, in which facts known by introspection no doubt play a part, but probably only a very subordinate part.  It is obvious, from what has been said about the structure of our habitual representations of other individuals, that our ordinary representation of ourselves will