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.

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 regardi