For in the first place they lie at the deepest level to which discipline can go. That is something. But by a happy fortuity there, at the very node between animal consciousness and rational thought, they occupy a strategic position. Through them the fluid streams of consciousness, rising from below, are articulated for thought--and one thinks what he can with the shapes thus formed. And through these same shapes come the chief enrichments of the consciousness from above. For in reality what I apprehend of the thoughts of others is not their thoughts but my own. It is what I build in my own mind with the particles of my own consciousness called up by the symbols they have used. They are the determinants, coming and going, and a discipline that thickens and deepens and clarifies them enhances at one stroke both the give and the take of the mind, its power to think and its power to learn. They lie at a strategic point, moreover, in another and no less momentous transaction. They not only articulate the individual mind for thinking; coming from a common tradition they tend, in the measure in which that tradition is mastered, to articulate disparate minds alike. Only so can two minds think the same thought. It is here that mind comes together with mind--or forever fails to come together. And situated between two realms of freedom--the wild realm of animal consciousness and the cultivated realm of reason--they alone are amenable to coercion. Arbitrary agreements, sheer conventions, subsequent to all native idiosyncrasies and prior to all conflict of prejudice or opinion, they are open to utter community. And since in relation to all thinking they are the ultimate premisses, they afford the unquestioned common grounds imperative for mutual understanding and community of idea. Discipline can thus bring its pressures to bear upon them with a clear conscience, assured that here it can do its essential task without violating its own principles--cultivate the individual judgment without infringing upon its freedom, and bring mind into community with mind without the weakness of assumption or the affront of dogmatism. Assured, too, that in a sort of beneficent circle community itself breeds both mind and further community. For given a broad community in these particles, the common legacy comes the purer to its inheritors; recurrence of each particle confirms and enriches and clarifies it in the experience of each mind. In a community without community, on the other hand, occurrence and recurrence tend rather to lead it astray and confuse it; and though men talk in common symbols, they build them into tacit obliquities of mutual incomprehension.