Graham Wallas, in his “Great Society,” wrote few more interesting sentences than that in which he remarked the paucity of genuine discussion around him, the lack of skill in meeting each others’ minds which Englishmen show when they talk together. Particularly in this country where mere talk is always contrasted unfavorably with action is discussion rare. The only way we can justify our substitution of talking for acting is to talk badly. And we like to talk badly. To put into talk the deliberate effort which action demands would seem an insufferable pedantry. Talk is one of the few unspecialized talents still left in a mechanical world. The plain man resents any invasion of this last preserve of freedom. He resents the demand that skill and effort be put to work in raising talk into real discussion where points are met and presuppositions are clarified and formulations made. So conversation is left to grow wild as a common flower along the wayside of our personal contacts. Yet this lack of art in discussion is not really due to lack of desire. An inner need drives talk into something more formal. Discussion is popular, and because it is popular it needs, in spite of the plain man, a certain deliberate technique. One often stumbles on groups which have met not because some problem has seized them all and will not let them go until it is satisfied, but because they have felt a general craving for talk. They find that their mental wheels will not rotate without some corn to grind. In the revelation of what each person thinks it important to discuss, one gets the attitude of his mind and the color of his governing philosophy. Such a group is a kind of kindergarten of discussion. Ostensibly equal and sympathetic in background and approach, they show in very little time the startling diversity of their actual equipment and mental framework. A score of people all doing apparently the same quality of work in the professional world, all enjoying a popular reputation, all backed by a college education, all reacting constantly to each other in the intersecting world of journalism, art, teaching, law, will often be found to show a lack of mental sympathy so profound that one wonders how such people can smilingly continue to seem to be living in the same world. They are using the same words, but they are not using the same meanings, and because they are not conscious that it is really meanings which they should be exchanging, the discussion is apt to lose itself feebly as in desert sands. What really emerges from most discussions, you find, is an astonishing array of philosophical skeletons-in-the-closet which stalk about the room unchallenged. Their owners are quite unconscious of this fatal escape. Yet it takes little wit to discover rigid platonists discoursing with pragmatists, minds whose first operation in thinking is always to fix a moral judgment contending with remorseless realists. Ideals are discussed when one man means by an ideal a