And everybody knows how common it is for musical critics and amateurs to discover quite dissimilar feelings in the same composition.[109] The effect of this active projection of personal feeling will, of course, be seen most strikingly when there is a certain variety of feeling actually excited at the time in the observer's mind.

A man who is in a particularly happy mood tends to reflect his exuberant gladness on others.

The lover, in the moment of exalted emotion, reads a response to all his aspirations in his mistress's eyes.

Again, a man will tend to project his own present ideas into the minds of others, and so imagine that they know what he knows; and this sometimes leads to a comical kind of embarrassment, and even to a betrayal of something which it was the interest of the person to keep to himself.

Once more, in interpreting language, we may sometimes catch ourselves mistaking the meaning, owing to the presence of a certain idea in the mind at the time.