Insight, Volume 3 Quotes

“In the ideal detective story the reader is given all the clues yet fails to spot the criminal. He may advert to each clue as it arises. He needs no further clues to solve the mystery. Yet he can remain in the dark for the simple reason that reaching the solution is not the mere apprehension of any clue, not the mere memory of all, but a quite distinct activity of organising intelligence that places the full set of clues in a unique explanatory perspective.

By insight, then, is meant not any act of attention or advertence or memory, but the supervening act of understanding. It is not any recondite intuition but the familiar event that occures easily and frequently in the moderately intelligent, rarely and with diffuculty only in the very stupid. In itself it is so simple and obvious that it seems to merit the little attention that commonly it receives. At the same time, its function in cognitional activity is so central that to grasp it in its conditions, its working, and its results, is to confer a basic yet startling unity on the whole field of human inquiry and human opinion.”
― Bernard J.F. Lonergan, Insight, Volume 3