This danger of becoming an isolate and a hermit is one that should be carefully studied in the interests of leadership. To combat it we must somehow supply the highly intelligent in their early years with companions, especially of their own age, who can understand what they say, and can answer. This difficulty of communication is illustrated by Voltaire's abortive attempt as an adult to get into contact with the peasants around him. In _The Ignorant Philosopher_, Voltaire says, "I discovered such a wide difference between thought and nourishment, without which I should not think that I believed that there was a substance in me that reasoned and another substance that digested. Nevertheless, by constantly endeavoring that we are two, I materially felt that I was only one: and this contradiction gave me infinite pain. I have asked some of my own likenesses, who cultivate the earth, our common mother, if they felt that they were two? If they had discovered by their philosophy that they possessed within them an immortal substance . . . acting upon their nerves without touching them, sent expressly into them six weeks after their conception? They thought that I was jesting and pursued the cultivation of their land without making me a reply." Even so, the ten-year-old, of IQ 175, wishes to discuss with his "own likenesses" the events of medieval history, but he finds that they make him "no reply." And if he persists, they become annoyed, hurling at him the dreadful epithet, "Perfesser." If he still persists, they pull his hair, tear his shirt from his back, and hit him with a beer bottle. (I am speaking of _real_ life.) Turning now to habits of chicanery, it would be a question for long and close debate, as to whether a highly gifted leader can ever live and do his work among the mass of men without developing a technique of benign chicanery. Many of the great political leaders have been past masters of benign chicanery, often exploiting the people for the good of the social order. Perhaps the arts of benign chicanery are absolutely necessary to a child of highest intelligence, compelled to find his spiritual way through mass education. Certain it is that these children learn all sorts of devious ways to self-preservation. For instance, two of our pupils of Public School 500 came to us followed by notes from teachers, saying they were hard-of-hearing. Both of them have very keen ears, but they had learned not to hear the insupportable drill on things they had known for years, and in self-defense they listened so little that their teachers thought them deaf. At Public School 500 their hearing is good--almost too good!