The first reflection of human beings 1. is lively precisely because phantasy is still fresh and vivacious, as it is in the youth of individuals, of nations and of humankind; 2. is new precisely because it is first reflection, discovering the relationships of things with a kind of creative inventiveness; 3. is sublime because it is necessarily concerned with relationships between the most important and necessary things, and indicates invisible beings such as a cause, a God; 4. is vast because it has not yet learnt to halt before particular things and their minute parts where there is nothing to hold its attention, but gazes around once more, ranging eagerly over everything to which, still unsatisfied, it adds the infinite.
[Antonio Rosmini, Certainty, Cleary and Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham: 1991), pp. 156-157.]
Rosmini notes that this is why ancient poetry often has the features it does. 'First reflection' is also responsible for the features of what he calls 'popular knowledge', which lies between direct or immediate knowledge and the philosophical knowledge that arises from what he calls 'second reflection'. In the sense that the terms are used here only direct knowledge is factive; that is, precisely because they are reflective, popular knowledge and philosophical knowledge can be mixed with various errors. But ideas arising from first reflection tend to have a vivid, common-sensical, concreteness to them, due to being a synthesis of different things into something that makes some kind of sense; their primary difficulty is a tendency to glide over potentially important distinctions. It is from dealing with this failing in popular knowledge that philosophical knowledge, arising from the much more analytical second reflection, comes; thus Rosmini says that philosophy first arises from the masses.