, 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 natural and an earlier
developed state of min