Daily Inspiration Quote by William Kingdon Clifford

Clifford is doing something slyly radical here: he treats public opinion as a statistical illusion. “Aggregate testimony” sounds sturdier than “one person’s say-so,” the way a crowd feels wiser than an individual. Clifford refuses the comfort. He insists that a pile of voices doesn’t magically graduate into truth; it’s still testimony, and testimony still has to earn its credibility.

The phrasing is calibrated to puncture a common moral loophole. People will scrutinize a single witness, then lower their standards the moment the same claim comes wrapped in numbers, tradition, or social unanimity. Clifford’s “simple and obvious enough” is a rhetorical eyebrow raise: you already know this, you just don’t like what it implies. The line carries his larger ethical project (famous from “The Ethics of Belief”): believing isn’t a private hobby but a civic act with consequences. If you allow yourself to be persuaded by the sheer mass of your neighbours’ certainty, you’re outsourcing responsibility to the crowd.

Context matters. In Victorian Britain, “what everyone knows” often traveled through pulpits, newspapers, and polite society with the authority of common sense. Clifford, a mathematician steeped in rigor, imports the discipline of error-checking into everyday belief. Subtext: group consensus is prone to shared blind spots, contagion, and duplicated mistakes. Ten neighbours repeating the same rumor may just be one bad source echoed ten times.

It’s an early warning about social proof: the crowd can be evidence, but only after you ask the same hard questions you’d ask of a single mouth.