In this way, we are wont to soften, beautify, and idealize the future, marking it off from the hard matter-of-fact present.
The less like the future experience to our past experience, or the more remote the time anticipated, the greater the scope for such imaginative transformation.

And from this stage of fanciful transformation of a future reality to the complete imaginative creation of such a reality, the step is but a small one.

Here we reach the full development of illusory expectation, that which corresponds to hallucination in the region of sense-perception.
In order to understand these extreme forms of illusory expectation, it will be necessary to say something more about the relation of imagination to anticipation in general.

There are, I conceive, good reasons for saying that any kind of vivid imagination tends to pass into a semblance of an expectation of a coming personal experience, or an event that is about to happen within the sphere of our own observation.
It has long been recognized by writers, among whom I may mention Dugald Stewart, that to distinctly imagine an event or object is to feel for the moment a degree of belief in the corresponding reality.

Now, I have already said that expectation is probably a more natural and an earlier developed state of mind than memory.