Even when there is no approach to an illusion of perception, or to one of memory in the strict sense, the reading of a work of fiction begets at the moment a retrospective belief that has a certain resemblance to a recollection.
All such illusions as those just illustrated, if not afterwards corrected, tend to harden into yet more distinctly "intuitive" errors.
Thus, for example, one of the crude geological hypotheses, of which Sir Charles Lyell tells us,[141] would, by the mere fact of being kept before the mind, tend to petrify into a hard fixed belief.

And this process of hardening is seen strikingly illustrated in the case of traditional errors, especially when these fall in with our own emotional propensities.

Our habitual representations of the remote historical past are liable to much the same kind of error as our recollections of early personal experience.

The wrong statements of others and the promptings of our own fancies may lead in the first instance to a filling up of the remote past with purely imaginary shapes.

Afterwards the particular origin of the belief is forgotten, and the assurance assumes the aspect of a perfectly intuitive conviction.