“An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person…” George Eliot, Middlemarch, Chapter XXVII
Replace the word “egoism” with “opinion” and the quote can stand unchanged.
shared ignorance 
My rambling thoughts on this paragraph: Things that happen in our life are the scratches. How we look at these things is the light. Each of us look at events through our own set of “eyes”. We interpret according to our own experiences. We frequently are in error as to the truth of how we interpret things. We like to see things so that they enhance our own feelings of self-worth. But we often miss the truth.