ilarly, a lover will read fine thoughts or
sentiments into the mind of his mistress under the influence of a strong
wish to admire.

And what applies to the illusory interpretation of others' feelings
applies to the ascription of feelings to inanimate objects. This is due
not simply to the impulse to expand one's conscious existence through
far-reaching resonances of sympathy, but also to a permanent or
temporary disposition to attribute a certain kind of feeling to an
object. Thus, the poet personifies nature in part because his emotional
cravings prompt him to construct the idea of something that can be
admired or worshipped. Once more, the action of a momentary feeling when
actually excited is seen in the "mechanical" impulse of a man to
retaliate when he strikes his foot against an object, as a chair, which
clearly involves a tendency to attribute an intention to hurt to the
unoffending body, and the _rationale_ of which odd procedure is pretty
correctly expressed in the popular phrase: "It relieves the feelings."

It is worth noting, perhaps, that these illusions of insight, like those
of perception, may involve an inattention to the actual impression of
the moment. To erroneously attribute a feeling to another through an
excess of sympathetic eagerness is often to overlook what a perfectly
dispassionate observer would see, as, for example, the immobility of the
features or the signs of a deliberate effort to simulate. This
inattention will, it is obvious, be greatest in the poetic attribution
of life and personality to natural objects, in so far as this
approximates to a complete momentary illusion. To see a dark overhanging
rock as a grim sombre human presence, is for the moment to view it under
this aspect only, abstracting from its many obvious unlikenesses.

In the same manner, a tendency to read a particular meaning into a word
may lead to the misapprehension of the word. To give an illustration: I
was lately reading the fifth volume of G. H. Lewes's _Problems of Life
and Mind_. In reading the first sentence of one of the sections, I again
and again fell into the error of taking "The great Lagrange," for "The
great Language." On glancing back I saw that the section was headed "On
Language," and I at once recognized the cause of my error in the
pre-existence in my mind of the representative image of the word
"language."

In concluding this short account of the errors of insight, I may observe
that their ra