A person may feel "intuitively certain" that something is going to happen to him which does not resemble anything in his past experience.

Not only so; even when the expectation corresponds to a bit of past experience, this source of the expectation may, under certain circumstances, be altogether lost to view, and the belief assume a secondarily automatic or intuitive character.

Thus, a man may have first entertained a belief in the success of some undertaking as the result of a rough process of inference, but afterwards go on trusting when the grounds for his confidence are wholly lost sight of.
This much may suffice for the present to show that belief sometimes approximates to immediate, or self-evident, conviction.

How far this is the case will come out in the course of our inquiry into its different forms.

This being so, it will be needful to include in our present study the errors connected with the process of belief in so far as they simulate the immediate instantaneous form of illusion.
What I have here called belief may be roughly distinguished into simple and compound belief.