Good discussion is so important that those who set about it may be rather pedantic and self-conscious in their enterprise. One may acutely realize himself as being, for the time, primarily a mind. He renounces the seeming of personal advantage in an argument. He sincerely and anxiously searches his intellectual stores in order to set down exactly what he thinks in just the proportions and colors that he thinks it. He studies what the others say, and tries to detect quickly the search for advantage or the loose use of terminology. He insists that words and phrases have meanings, and if they carry no meaning to him, he searches indefatigably until he has found the word that does carry over the full freight of significance intended. The rewards for such pedantry are found in a tone of clear thinking. A good discussion increases the dimensions of every one who takes part. Being rather self-consciously a mind in a group of minds means becoming more of a person. Ideas are stale things until they are personally dramatized. The only good writers of opinion are those who instinctively reproduce the atmosphere of discussion, whose sentences have the tone of discussion with themselves or with an imagined group. The impulse for discussion is an impulse towards the only environment where creative thinking can be done. All the more reason why an instinct for workmanship should come in to insure that thought does not lose itself in feeble sparring or detached monologue. THE PURITAN’S WILL TO POWER To the modern young person who tries to live well there is no type so devastating and harassing as the puritan. We cannot get away from him. In his sight we always live. We finish with justifying our new paganism against him, but we never quite lose consciousness of his presence. Even Theodore Dreiser, who has always revolted from the puritan clutch, finds it necessary now and then to tilt a lance against him. If there were no puritans we should have to invent them. And if the pagan Mr. Dreiser has to keep on through life fighting puritans, how much more intrigued must we be who are only reformed puritans, and feel old dangers stirring at every aggressive gesture of righteousness? For the puritan is the most stable and persistent of types. It is scarcely a question of a puritanical age and a pagan age. It is only a question of more puritans or less puritans. Even the most emancipated generation will find that it has only broken its puritanism up into compartments, and balances sexual freedom--or better, perhaps, a pious belief in sexual freedom--with a cult of efficiency and personal integrity which is far more coercive than the most sumptuary of laws. Young people who have given up all thought of “being good” anxiously celebrate a cult of “making good.” And a superstition like eugenics threatens to terrorize the new intelligentsia.