s one mark
that your opinions are worth having. When the conflict arises, we are
usually led to consider how fallible other men are. They are fallible,
we say, because they are human. How little any poor man knows! Yes,
but if this principle holds true, how doubtful are my own opinions!
Yet if I fill my mind with that reflection, to the exclusion of all
other reasonable considerations, I condemn myself not to mere
fallibility, but to certain failure.

The paradox is universal. It pervades all forms and activities of
human inquiry. That is the first synthetic observation of the reason,
when it surveys the field of human opinion. Everywhere we live by
undertaking to transcend in opinion what the {107} evidence before us,
at any one moment, directly and infallibly warrants. But is it
rational to do this? And if so, _why_ is it rational?

The answer is that while there is much irrational presumption and
overconfidence in our human world, there is also a perfectly rational
principle which warrants certain forms and methods of thus
transcending in our opinions the immediately presented evidence of the
moment when we judge. This principle is as universal as it is
generally neglected. Rightly understood, it simply transforms for you
your whole view of the real universe in which you live.

An opinion of yours may be true or false. But when you form an
opinion, what are you trying to do? You are trying to anticipate, in
some fashion, what a wider view, a larger experience of your present
situation, a fuller insight into your present ideas, and into what
they mean, would show you, if you now had that wider view and larger
experience. Such an effort to anticipate what the wider view would
even now show, if you were possessed of that view, involves both what
are usually called theoretical interests and what pragmatists, such as
James himself, have often characterised as practical interests. One
can express the matter by saying, that you are trying, through your
opinions, to predict what a larger insight, if it were present to you,
would show or would find, that is, would experience. You can also say
that you are trying to define what {108} a fuller apprehension and a
fairer estimate of your present purposes, and intentions, and
interests, and deeds, and of their outcome, and of their place in
life, would bring before your vision. In brief (whether you lay more
stress upon deeds and their outcome, or upon experiences and their
co