A moment's consideration will show that our prevailing views respecting any section of mankind, say our fellow-countrymen, or mankind at large, correspond at best to a very loose process of reasoning. The accidents of our personal experience and opportunities of observation, the traditions which coloured our first ideas, the influence of our dominant feelings in selecting for attention and retention certain aspects of the complex object, and in idealizing this object,--these sources of passive and active illusion, must, to say the least, have had as much to do with our present solidified and seemingly "intuitive" knowledge as anything that can be called the exercise of individual judgment and reasoning power. The force of this observation and the proof that such widely generalized beliefs are in part illusory, is seen in the fact that men of unlike experience and unlike temperament form such utterly dissimilar views of the same object. Thus, as Mr. Spencer has shown,[144] in looking at things national there may be not only a powerful patriotic bias at work in the case of the vulgar Philistine, but also a distinctly anti-patriotic bias in the case of the over-fastidious seeker after culture. And I need hardly add that the different estimates of mankind held with equal assurance by the cynic, the misanthropist, and the philanthropic vindicator of his species, illustrate a like diversity of the psychological conditions of belief. Finally, illusion may enter into that still wider collection of beliefs which make up our ordinary views of life and the world as a whole. Here there reflect themselves in the plainest manner the accidents of our individual experience and the peculiar errors to which our intellectual and emotional conformation disposes us. The world is for us what we feel it to be; and we feel it to be the cause of our particular emotional experience. Just as we have found that our environment helps to determine our idea of self and personal continuity, so, conversely, our inner experience, our remembered or imagined joys and sorrows throw a reflection on the outer world, giving it its degree of worth. Hence the contradictory, and consequently to some extent at least illusory, views of the optimist and the pessimist, "intuitions" which, I have tried to show elsewhere, are connected with deeply rooted habits of feeling, and are antecedent to all reasoned philosophic systems. If proof were yet wanted that these wide-embracing beliefs may to some extent be illusory, it would be found in the fact that they can be distinctly coloured by a temporary mood or mental tone. As I have more than once had occasion to remark, a feeling when present tends to colour all the ideas of the time. And when out of sorts, moody, and discontented, a man is prone to find a large objective cause of his dissatisfaction in a world out of joint and not moving to his mind.