In detail the non-evidentiary causes of belief are as follows: (_a_) not only the truths of experience become massed or systematised in common sense and science, but the errors of misinterpreted experience and tradition form similar aggregates. Coincidences mistaken for causation, illusions, dreams, tales of thaumaturgy and ghost-stories, so far as they have anything in common in their outlines or emotional tone, form apperceptive masses which function in the same way as scientific systems: each of their constituent beliefs strengthens and is strengthened by the rest; and each mass (as a delusive “understanding”) readily assimilates and confirms any new tale or illusion having its own character, and resists and repels every judgment having a different structure—and, therefore, refuses explanation. And just as science and common sense have a sort of internal skeleton of principles which has been exhibited as Logic, so some of these comparatively obscure and chaotic masses of illusion and tradition contain certain structural principles which, though unconscious at the lowest human level, obtain recognition as culture advances—for example, the principles of mimetic and contagious magic; and then, too, arise such caricatures of science as theogonies and cosmologies, chiromancy, astrology and so forth. But nothing ever emerges from them that can be called a test of truth or methodology; much less, of course, can such a thing be found at lower levels of culture. There you see the accumulating clouds of imagination-belief, which gather together from all the winds and pile themselves up to overshadow poor humanity age after age; which still, in our own world, are by no means dissipated; and to whose persistent influence we may (I suppose) attribute the mysticism that periodically infects philosophy itself. (_b_) Contributory to these masses of error are bad observations, confused and distorted memories, dreams and corrupted testimony and tradition, all of them having their origin in some sort of experience and matter-of-fact, and all issuing in vain imaginations. For of course there is no such thing as imagination underived from experience; experience is distorted and corrupted by superstition, but it transfers to superstition the attitude of belief that always belongs to experience, and supplies materials from which (as we shall see) it is often possible to construct such a defence of superstition as, to an unsophisticated mind, must be very plausible and persuasive.[86] Direct experience is often interpreted by a story in such a way as to make the story more credible. If a stone is shown as marking the tomb of a hero, or a cleft in the mountain as proving the prowess of a wizard, one unconsciously transfers the attitude of belief involved in contemplating these relics to all the legends concerning those mighty men of old.