There are many people, moreover, who want to score, to be brilliant, rather than to find agreement. Others come prepared with what they are going to say and either this has often been said long before they get a chance to speak, or, in any case, it allows no give-and-take, so they contribute nothing; when we really learn the process our ideas will be struck out by the interplay. To compare notes on what we have thought separately is not to think together. I asked a man once to join a committee I was organizing and he replied that he would be very glad to come and give his advice. I didn’t want him—and didn’t have him. I asked another man and he said he would like very much to come and learn but that he couldn’t contribute anything. I didn’t have him either—I hadn’t a school. Probably the last man thought he was being modest and, therefore, estimable. But what I wanted was to get a group of people who would deliberately work out a thing together. I should have liked very much to have the man who felt that he had advice to give if he had had also what we are now learning to call the social attitude, that is, that of a man willing to take his place in the group, no less and no more. This definition of social attitude is very different from our old one—the willingness to give; my friend who wanted to come and give advice had that, but that is a crude position compared with the one we are now advocating. It is clear then that we do not go to our group—trade-union, city council, college faculty—to be passive and learn, and we do not go to push through something we have already decided we want. Each must discover and contribute that which distinguishes him from others, his difference. The only use for my difference is to join it with other differences. The unifying of opposites is the eternal process.[7] We must have an imagination which will leap from the particular to the universal. Our joy, our satisfaction, must always be in the more inclusive aspect of our problem. We can test our group in this way: do we come together to register the results of individual thought, to compare the results of individual thought in order to make selections therefrom, or do we come together to create a common idea? Whenever we have a real group something new _is_ actually created. We can now see therefore that the object of group life is not to find the best individual thought, but the collective thought. A committee meeting isn’t like a prize show aimed at calling out the best each can possibly produce and then the prize (the vote) awarded to the best of all these individual opinions. The object of a conference is not to get at a lot of different ideas, as is often thought, but just the opposite—to get at one idea. There is nothing rigid or fixed about thoughts, they are entirely plastic, and ready to yield themselves completely to their master—the group spirit.[8]