thing most of the
time. And that is true of philosophers. You must penetrate the ponderous
vocabulary, the professional cant to the insight beneath or you scoff at
the mountain ranges of words and phrases. It is this that Bergson means
when he tells us that a philosopher's intuition always outlasts his
system. Unless you get at that you remain forever foreign to the thinker.

That too is why debating is such a wretched amusement and most
partisanship, most controversy, so degrading. The trick here is to argue
from the opponent's language, never from his insight. You take him
literally, you pick up his sentences, and you show what nonsense they
are. You do not try to weigh what you see against what he sees; you
contrast what you see with what he says. So debating becomes a way of
confirming your own prejudices; it is never, never in any debate I have
suffered through, a search for understanding from the angles of two
differing insights.

And, of course, in those more sinister forms of debating, court trials,
where the stakes are so much bigger, the skill of a successful lawyer is
to make the atmosphere as opaque as possible to the other lawyer's
contention. Men have been hanged as a result. How often in a political
campaign does a candidate suggest that behind the platforms and speeches
of his opponents there might be some new and valuable understanding of
the country's need?

The fact is that we argue and quarrel an enormous lot over words. Our
prevailing habit is to think about phrases, "ideals," theories, not about
the realities they express. In controversy we do not try to find our
opponent's meaning: we examine his vocabulary. And in our own efforts to
shape policies we do not seek out what is worth doing: we seek out what
will pass for moral, practical, popular or constitutional.

In this the Vice Commission reflected our national habits. For those
earnest men and women in Chicago did not set out to find a way of
abolishing prostitution; they set out to find a way that would conform to
four idols they worshiped. The only cure for prostitution might prove to
be "immoral," "impractical," unconstitutional, and unpopular. I suspect
that it is. But the honest thing to do would have been to look for that
cure without preconceived notions. Having found it, the Commission could
then have said to the public: "This is what will cure the social evil. It
means these changes in industry, sex relations, law and public opinion