In thinking of myself in any part of the past or future in which there is actually no consciousness, or of which the conscious content is quite unknown to me, I necessarily imagine myself as consciously experiencing something.

If I picture myself under any definitely conceived circumstances, I irresistibly import into my mental image the feelings appropriate to these surroundings.

In this way, people tend to imagine themselves after death as lying in the grave, feeling its darkness and its chilliness.

If the circumstances of the time are not distinctly represented, the conception of the conscious experience which constitutes that piece of the ego is necessarily vague, and seems generally to resolve itself into a representation of ourselves as dimly _self-conscious_.

What this consciousness of self consists of is a point that will be taken up presently.
_Illusions with respect to Personal Identity._ It would seem to follow from these errors in imaginatively filling up our past life, that our consciousness of personal identity is by no means the simple and exact process which it is commonly supposed to be.
I have already remarked that the very fact of there being so large a region of the irrevocable in our past experience proves our consciousness of personal continuity to be largely a matter of inference, or of imaginative conjecture, and not simply of immediate recollection.