To the artist is sometimes granted a sudden, transient insight which serves in this matter for experience. A flash, and where previously the brain held a dead fact, the soul grasps a living truth! At moments we are all artists.

Bennett contrasts second-hand knowledge (“a dead fact” held by the brain) with the kind of immediate, felt understanding that art can suddenly confer (“a living truth” grasped by the soul). The “flash” suggests intuition or imaginative sympathy: a moment when perception becomes experiential rather than merely informational. By adding “At moments we are all artists,” he democratizes this capacity—artistic insight is not limited to professionals but is a human potential that appears intermittently in anyone. The remark also implies that art’s value lies in transforming data into meaning, and in making reality vivid, personal, and morally or emotionally intelligible.