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 be tinged with that mass of error which we have found to be connected with single acts of introspection, recollections of past personal experience, and illusory single expectations of future personal experiences. How large an opening for erroneous conviction here presents itself can only be understood by a reference to certain deeply fixed impulses and feelings connected with, the very consciousness of self, and favouring what I have marked off as active illusion. I shall try to show very briefly that each man's intuitive persuasion of his own powers, gifts, or importance--in brief, of his own particular value, contains, from the first, a palpable ingredient of active illusion.