Still more is it due to the control of our mental processes by association and habit.

These forces, which are at the very root of intelligence, are also, in a sense, the originators of error.

Through the accidents of our experience or the momentary condition of our reproductive power, representations get wrongly grouped with presentations and with one another; wrongly grouped, that is to say, according to a perfect or ideal standard, namely, that the grouping should always exactly agree with the order of experience as a whole, and the force of cohesion be proportionate to the number of the conjunctions of this experience.
This great source of error has been so abundantly illustrated under the head of Passive Illusions that I need not dwell on it further.

It is plain that a passive error of perception, or of expectation, is due in general to a defective grouping of elements, to a grouping which answers, perhaps, to the run of the individual's actual experience, but not to a large and complete common experience.[148] Similarly, an illusory general belief is plainly a welding together of elements (here concepts, answering to innumerable representative images) in disagreement with the permanent connections of experience.

Even a passive illusion of memory, in so far as it involves a rearrangement of successive representations, shows the same kind of defect.
In the second place, this incorrect grouping maybe due, not to defects in attention and discrimination, combined with insufficiently grounded association, but to the independent play of constructive imagination and the caprices of feeling.