ed by
the larger view to which it appeals. False is the assertion that is
not thus confirmed. _Upon such a conception the very ideas of truth
and error depend. Without such a conception truth and error have no
sense_. If such a conception is not itself {110} a true view of our
situation, that is, if there is no wider insight, our opinions have
neither truth nor error, and are all of them alike merely meaningless.
When you are ignorant, you are ignorant of what the wider view makes
clear to its own insight. If you blunder or are deluded, your blunder
is due to a defective apprehension which the wider view confirms. And
thus, whether you are ignorant or blundering, wise or foolish, whether
the truth or the falsity of your present opinion is supposed to be
actual, one actuality is equally and rationally presupposed, as the
actuality to which all your opinions refer, and in the light of which
they possess sense. _This is the actuality of some wider insight with
reference to which your own opinion gets its truth or its falsity_.

To this wider insight, to this always presupposed vision of experience
as it is, of the facts as they are, you are always appealing. Your
every act of assertion displays the genuineness of the appeal and
exemplifies the absolute rational necessity of asserting that the
appeal is made to an insight that is itself real.

Frequently you do, indeed, call this insight merely the common-sense
of mankind. But, strange to say, this common-sense of mankind is
always and inevitably conceived by you in terms that distinguish it
from the fleeting momentary views of any or of all merely individual
men. Men--if I may judge them by my own case, and by what I hear other
{111} men confess--men, when taken merely as individuals, always live
from moment to moment in a flickering way, normally confident, indeed,
but clearly seeing at any one instant very little at a time. They are
narrow in the span of the more direct insight. They grasp data bit by
bit, and comprehend, in their instantaneous flashes of insight, only
little scraps and tiny bundles of ideas. I who now speak to you cannot
hold clearly and momentarily before my mind at once even all of the
meaning that I try to express in two or three of my successive
sentences. I live looking before and after, and pining for what is
not, and grasping after unity; and I find each moment crumbling as it
flies; and each thought and each sentence of my discourse drops into