It is evident that all the permanent beliefs touched on in this chapter must constitute powerful predispositions with respect to any particular act of perception, insight, introspection, or recollection. In other words, these persistent beliefs, so far as individual or personal, are but another name for those fixed habits of mind which, in the case of each one of us, constitute our intellectual bias, and the source of the error known as personal equation. And it may be added that, just as these erroneous beliefs existing in the shape of fixed prejudices constitute a bias to new error, so they act as powerful resisting forces in relation to new truth and the correction of error. In comparing these illusions of belief with those of perception and memory, we cannot fail to notice their greater compass or range, in other words, the greater extent of the region of fact misrepresented. Even if they are less forcible and irresistible than these errors, they clearly make up for this by the area which they cover. Another thing to be observed with respect to these comprehensive beliefs is that where, as here, so many co-operant conditions are at work, the whole amount of common objective agreement is greatly reduced. In other words, individual peculiarities of intellectual conformation, emotional temperament, and experience have a far wider scope for their influence in these beliefs than they have in the case of presentative cognitions. At the same time, it is noteworthy that error much more rapidly propagates itself here than in the case of our perceptions or recollections. As we have seen, these beliefs all include much more than the results of the individual's own experience. They offer a large field for the influence of personal ascendency, of the contagion of sympathy, and of authority and tradition. As a consequence of this, the illusions of belief are likely to be far more persistent than those of perception or of memory; for not only do they lose that salutary process of correction which comparison with the experience of others affords, but they may even be strengthened and upheld to some extent by such social influences. And here the question might seem to obtrude itself, whether, in relation to such a fluctuating mass of belief as that just reviewed, in which there appears to be so little common agreement, we can correctly speak of anything as objectively determinable. If illusion and error as a whole are defined by a reference to what is commonly held true and certain, what, it may be asked, becomes of the so-called illusions of belief?