A little way back we contemplated the pseudo-emancipation of herd action. Let us close this section by noticing the opposite pseudo-emancipation of smart minds that are not cooperative. We have had in recent years not a little free-lance criticism of everything in our civilization. With much of the “de-bunking” that has resulted, these pages have shown sympathy. But much of this criticism fails to attain complete objectivity because the critic takes no means to correct his own necessarily faulty personal equation. His personality, his theory of the universe, or his dominant mood so mingles with his description of actualities that the final effect is the pitting of a newly conventionalized individual against older conventions. This will be found in fiction, in essay, and in criticism. These authors feel, perhaps, that they are exercising great freedom, whereas in fact much of their capacity for apprehending fact, for critical judgment, and for reconstruction is bound by their solitariness or their partizanship. Full emancipation comes only through some form of cooperative thinking. XXIX MY INTRACTABLE SELF The problem of releasing our powers is the problem of both mastering and submitting to the process of becoming a person. A submission that is also a mastering! Here is the paradox of rationality in a finite and growing being. A sort of dialectic is involved: Self-affirmation, followed by self-denial, and then realization that this denial of self is in reality a higher and fuller affirmation of selfhood. I am not conscious, when I say this, of being under the influence of Hegel, and certainly I do not regard this process as abstractly logical. It is not the logical inconsistency of our self-assertiveness that is so troublesome, but the consequences of it in pain, injustice, sensuality, on the one hand, and on the other hand the numbing of high motives of which we are by nature capable. This interplay of apparent opposites appears in the large in the majority-minority-majority cycle. Power in the majority gives rise from within itself to power-in-weakness in a minority; this after struggle grows into the major self-affirmation of the society in question, and then, in turn, a new minority is required. A parallel cycle is fulfilled in the individual through the medium of cooperative thinking. Before the experience of cooperative thinking he affirms or believes or acts upon the basis of a narrow experience; cooperative thinking submits his case to a wider, more varied experience, in which he ceases to take himself as the majority; but behold, this submission frees and intensifies his own individuality, whereupon the cycle begins over again.