Even supposing the expectation to have originated from some rational source, as from a conscious inference from past experience, or from the acceptance of somebody's statement, the very habit of cherishing the anticipation tends to invest it with an automatic self-sufficient character.

To all intents and purposes the prevision becomes intuitive, by which I mean that the mind is at the time immediately certain that something is going to happen, without needing to fall back on memory or reflection.

This being so, whenever the initial process of inference or quasi-inference happens to have been bad, an illusory expectation may arise.

In other words, the force of repetition and habit tends to harden what may, in its initial form, have resembled a kind of fallacy into an illusion.
And now let us proceed further.

When a permanent expectation is thus formed, there arises the possibility of processes which favour illusion precisely analogous to those which we have studied in the case of memory.
In the first place, the habit of imagining a future event is attended with a considerable amount of illusion as to time or remoteness.