The deepest ground of this tendency must probably be looked for in the primitive ideas of the race, and the transmission by inheritance of the effect of its firmly fixed habits of mind.

The undisciplined mind of early man, incapable of distinguishing the object of perception from the product of spontaneous imagination, and taking his own double existence as the type of all existence, actually saw the stream, the ocean, and the mountain as living beings; and so firmly rooted is this way of regarding objects, that even our scientifically trained minds find it a relief to relapse occasionally into it.[110] While there is this general imaginative disposition in the poetic mind to endow nature with life and consciousness, there are special tendencies to project the individual feelings into objects.

Every imaginative mind looks for reflections of its own deepest feelings in the world about it.

The lonely embittered heart, craving for sympathy, which he cannot meet with in his fellow-man, finds traces of it in the sighing of the trees or the moaning of the sad sea-wave.

Our Poet Laureate, in his great elegy, has abundantly illustrated this impulse of the imagination to reflect its own emotional colouring on to inanimate things: for example in the lines-- "The wild unrest that lives in woe Would dote and pore on yonder cloud That rises upward always higher, And onward drags a labouring breast, And topples round the dreary west, A looming bastion fringed with fire." So far I have been considering active illusions of insight as arising through the play of the impulse of the individual mind to project its feelings outwards, or to see their reflections in external things.