ntents), any expression of opinion, made at any time, is an appeal
of the self of the moment to the verdict, to the estimate, to the
experience of a larger and better informed insight, in the light of
which the self of the moment proposes to be judged. The special
criteria by which your momentary opinion is tested, at the time when
you form that opinion, vary endlessly with your mood and your training
and your feelings, and with the topics and tasks in which you happen
to be interested. But the universal form in which any opinion comes to
your consciousness, and gets its definition for your own mind, is this
form of an appeal to an insight that is superior in grasp, in unity,
in coherence, in reasonableness to your momentary insight.

Now you can indeed say: "When I form and express an opinion, I appeal
from my present experiences to some wider insight that I view _as if
it were_ possible. My opinion asserts that _if I were_ permitted to
see what I just now do not directly experience, I should find the
facts to be so and so." But no such account of the matter is quite
complete. Everything that you regard as possible has to be conceived
as somehow based upon what you regard {109} as actual. And so, in
fact, your opinions are always appeals to some form of wider or larger
or deeper or richer insight that, in the act of appealing to it, you
regard as a present or as a past or as a future reality--in brief, as
a live and perfectly concrete insight to whose verdict you appeal.
Philosophers often express this by saying that all opinions are
nothing but efforts to formulate the real contents of experience. This
view I accept.

So then, as I insist, whatever your opinions, your expression of them
is an appeal to some wider insight that you regard as real, and that
you view as a live insight which comprehends your ideas, and which
sees how they are related to genuine experience. This, I affirm, is
the universal form which all opinion takes. A true opinion is true,
because in fact it expresses what the wider insight confirms. A false
opinion is false, because it is refuted by the light of this same
wider view. Apart from such a confirmation or refutation in the light
of such a larger view, the very concepts of truth and error, as
applied to opinions which are not wholly confirmed or set aside by the
instantaneous evidence of the moment when the opinions are formed or
uttered, have no meaning. True is the judgment that is confirm