momentary forgetfulness so soon as I have carefully built up its
passing structure. In our life all thus flows. We fly from one flash
of insight to another.

But nevertheless our opinions, so we say, reflect sometimes the
common-sense of mankind. They conform to the verdict of humanity. But
who amongst us ever goes beyond thus confidently holding that he
reflects the common-sense of mankind? Who amongst us personally and
individually experiences, at any moment, the confirmation said to be
given by the verdict of humanity? The verdict of humanity? What man
ever finds immediately presented to his own personal insight that
totality of data upon which this verdict is said to depend? {112} The
common-sense of mankind? What mortal man is there who ever finds
incorporated in his flickering, fleeting, crumbling, narrow moments of
personal experience the calm and secure insight which this
common-sense of mankind, or of enlightened mankind, is said to
possess?

No, the common-sense of mankind is, for us all, a sort of
super-individual insight, to which we appeal without ourselves fully
possessing it. This "_common_"-sense of mankind is just the sense
_which no man of us all ever individually possesses_. For us all it
is, indeed, something superhuman. We spend part of our busy little
lives in somewhat pretentiously undertaking to report its dicta. But
it is simply one of the countless forms in which we conceive the wider
insight to be incorporated. _The true rational warrant for this
confidence of ours lies in the fact that whatever else is real, some
form of such a wider insight, some essentially super-individual and
superhuman insight is real_. For unless it is real our opinions,
including any opinion that we may have that doubts or questions or
denies its reality, are all equally meaningless. Thus even when we
appeal to common-sense we really appeal to a genuine but super-human
insight.

Let us not here spend time, however, upon analysing this or that
special form in which we are accustomed, for one special purpose or
another, to conceive the wider insight. What is clear is that we
constantly, and in every opinion, in every confession of {113}
ignorance appeal to such an insight. That such an insight is real,
must be presupposed even in order to assert that our present opinions
are errors. What interests us most at this point is, however, this,
that whatever else the whole real universe is, the real universe
exists only i