It may be added that many of our every-day working beliefs about the world in which we live, though presumably derived from memory and perception, tend to lose all traces of their origin, and to simulate the aspect of intuitions.

Thus the proposition that logicians are in the habit of pressing on our attention, that "Men are mortal," seems, on the face of it, to common sense to be something very like a self-evident truth, not depending on any particular facts of experience.
In calling these four forms of cognition immediate, I must not, however, be supposed to be placing them on the same logical level.

It is plain, indeed, to a reflective mind that, though each may be called immediate in this superficial sense, there are perceptible differences in the degree of their immediacy.

Thus it is manifest, after a moment's reflection, that expectation, so far as it is just, is not primarily immediate in the sense in which purely presentative knowledge is so, since it can be shown to follow from something else.

So a general proposition, though through familiarity and innumerable illustrations it has acquired a self-evident character, is seen with a very little inspection to be less fundamentally and essentially so than the proposition, "I am now feeling pain;" and it will be found that even with respect to memory, when the remembered event is at all remote, the process of cognition approximates to a mediate operation, namely, one of inference.