It would at first sight seem to be a perfectly simple thing to determine at any given moment whether we are enjoying ourselves, whether our emotional condition rises above the pleasure-threshold or point of indifference and takes on a positive hue of the agreeable or pleasurable.

Yet there is good reason for supposing that people not unfrequently deceive themselves on this matter.

It is, perhaps, hardly an exaggeration to say that most of us are capable of imagining that we are having enjoyment when we conform to the temporary fashion of social amusement.

It has been cynically observed that people go into society less in order to be happy than to seem so, and one may add that in this semblance of enjoyment they may, provided they are not _blase_, deceive themselves as well as others.

The expectation of enjoyment, the knowledge that the occasion is intended to bring about this result, the recognition of the external signs of enjoyment in others--all this may serve to blind a man in the earlier stages of social amusement to his actual mental condition.
If we look closely into this variety of illusion, we shall see that it is very similar in its structure and origin to that kind of erroneous perception which arises from inattention to the actual impression of the moment under the influence of a strong expectation of something different.