The early crude stages of physical science abundantly illustrate the genesis of such illusions.
It may be added that if there be any feeling present in the mind at the time, the barest suggestion of something having happened will suffice to produce the immediate assurance.

Thus, an angry person is apt to hastily accuse another of having done certain things on next to no evidence.

The love of the marvellous seems to have played a conspicuous part in building up and sustaining the fanciful hypotheses which mark the dawn of physical science.
Verbal suggestion is a common mode of producing this semblance of a recollected event.

By means of the narrative style, it vividly suggests the idea that the events described belong to the past, and excites the imagination to a retrospective construction of them as though they were remembered events.

Hence the power of works of fiction on the ordinary mind.