Our permanent idea of another reflects all that we have fondly imagined the person capable of doing, and thus is made up of an ideal as well as a real actually known personality.

And this result of spontaneous imagination must be taken to include the ideals entertained by others who are likely to have influenced us by their beliefs.[142] Enough has probably been said to show how immensely improbable it is that our permanent cognition of so complex an object as a particular human being should be at all an accurate representation of the reality, how much of the erroneous is certain to get mixed up with the true.

And this being so, we may say that our apparently simple direct cognition of a given person, our assurance of what he is and will continue to be, is to some extent illusory.
_Illusion of Self-Esteem._ Let us now pass to another case of compound representation, where the illusory element is still more striking.

I refer to the idea of self which each of us habitually carries about with him.

Every man's opinion of himself, as a whole, is a very complex mental product, in which facts known by introspection no doubt play a part, but probably only a very subordinate part.