In other words, individual peculiarities of intellectual conformation, emotional temperament, and experience have a far wider scope for their influence in these beliefs than they have in the case of presentative cognitions.
At the same time, it is noteworthy that error much more rapidly propagates itself here than in the case of our perceptions or recollections.

As we have seen, these beliefs all include much more than the results of the individual's own experience.

They offer a large field for the influence of personal ascendency, of the contagion of sympathy, and of authority and tradition.

As a consequence of this, the illusions of belief are likely to be far more persistent than those of perception or of memory; for not only do they lose that salutary process of correction which comparison with the experience of others affords, but they may even be strengthened and upheld to some extent by such social influences.
And here the question might seem to obtrude itself, whether, in relation to such a fluctuating mass of belief as that just reviewed, in which there appears to be so little common agreement, we can correctly speak of anything as objectively determinable.

If illusion and error as a whole are defined by a reference to what is commonly held true and certain, what, it may be asked, becomes of the so-called illusions of belief?
This question will have to be fully dealt with in the following chapter.
Here it may be sufficient to remark that amid all this apparent deviation of belief from a common standard of truth, there is a clear tendency to a rational consensus.