The remote, and therefore obscure, in space and in time has always been the favourite region for the projection of pleasant fancies.
Once more, besides these oblique kinds of expectation, I may form other seemingly simple beliefs, to which the term expectation seems less clearly applicable.

Thus, on waking in the morning and finding the ground covered with snow, my imagination moves backwards, as in the process of memory, and realizes the spectacle of the softly falling snow-flakes in the hours of the night.

The oral communication of others' experience, including the traditions of the race, enables me to set out from any present point of time, and reconstruct complex chains of experience of vast length lying beyond the bounds of my own personal recollection.
I need not here discuss what the exact nature of such beliefs is.

J.S.
Mill identifies them with expectations.

Thus, according to him, my belief in the nocturnal snowstorm is the assurance that I should have seen it had I waited up during the night.