Cooperative thinking thus understood offers a marvellous emancipation to us who are caught in the web of selfhood. An emancipation both negative and positive, both from something and into something. It offers, to begin with, as real a “letting go” as the emotional sprees that simulate freedom. When I enter wholeheartedly into discussion, as we are coming to understand this term, I rise out of my inhibitions, my strains, my defence-attitudes, my feeling that the weal or the woe of myself, my party, my institution, or society in general is hanging by a thread that I am holding between my fingers. What a relief! And what a smoothing out of the wrinkles of the mind ensues when one casts out pride of being right, and, instead of being embarrassed when one is found to be in error, rejoices in being set right. This is one phase of the becoming “as a little child” that Jesus recommended. But this is a letting go, not into a controlling emotion, but into a more limber use of intelligence. The change is like that which a tennis player, or a piano player, experiences when he learns how to relax his wrist. Questions now bob up where they were not suspected; one sees hitherto unrealized meanings in the other fellow’s thought; one’s own notions now appear in a new perspective, and one actually understands one’s own ideas better than before; the as-yet-unknown and the as-yet-unfinished come out of the shadows and show themselves for what they are, and therefore the lure of study increases. New possibilities now seem worth trying, and expectancy of unprecedented good is nourished. Here are conditions that favor invention, originality, and creativeness. There is, first, release from tensions; then, vivid consciousness of a problem; next, stimulation by varied data and alternatives, and finally, criticism of all proposed solutions. No doubt the climax of creativity will occur as a rule in moments of solitary reflection, but this free fellowship of mind prepares the way. It starts the appropriate mood and attitude; it helps define our discontents; it gets us out of our ruts. Cooperative _thinking_ does not flatten out the individual; rather, it saves him from the merely type-reactions of both himself and his professional and social environment.