I have given some of the conditions necessary for collective thinking. In every governing board—city councils, hospital and library trustees, the boards of colleges and churches, in business and industry, in directors’ meetings—no device should be neglected which will help to produce joint rather than individual thinking. But no one has yet given us a scientific analysis of the conditions necessary or how to fulfil them. We do not yet know, for instance, the best number to bring out the group idea, the number, that is, which will bring out as many differences as possible and yet form a whole or group. We cannot guess at it but only get it through scientific experiments. Much laboratory work has to be done. The numbers on Boards of Education, on Governors’ Commissions, should be determined by psychological as well as by political reasons. Again it is said that private sessions are undemocratic. If they contribute to true collective thinking (instead of efforts to dazzle the gallery), then, in so far, they are democratic, for there is nothing in the world so democratic as the production of a genuine group will. Mr. Gladstone must have appreciated the necessity of making conditions favorable to joint thinking, for I have been told that at important meetings of the Cabinet he planned beforehand where each member should sit. The members of a group are reciprocally conditioning forces none of which acts as it would act if any one member were different or absent. You can often see this in a board of directors: if one director leaves the room, every man becomes slightly different.