till.

A society that really aims at the furtherance of knowledge, might test
its operations by now and then preparing a report of progress; setting
forth what problems had been debated, what themes elucidated, and with
what results. It would be very refreshing to see a candid avowal that
after several attempts--both debate and essay--some leading topic of the
department remained exactly where it stood at the outset. After such a
confession, the Society might well resolve itself into a Committee of
the Whole House, to consider its ways, and indeed its entire position,
with a view to a new start on some more hopeful track.

My closing remark is, as to avoiding debates that are in their very
nature interminable. It is easy to fix upon a few salient features that
make all the difference between a hopeful and a hopeless controversy.
For one thing, there is a certain intensity of emotion, interest, bias,
or prejudice if you will, that can neither reason nor be reasoned with.
On the purely intellectual side, the disqualifying circumstances are
complexity and vagueness. If a topic necessarily hauls in numerous other
topics of difficulty, the essay may do something for it, but not the
debate. Worst of all is the presence of several large, ill-defined, or
unsettled terms, of which there are still plenty in our department. A
not unfrequent case is a combination of the several defects each perhaps
in a small degree. A tinge of predilection or party, a double or triple
complication of doctrines, and one or two hazy terms, will make a debate
that is pretty sure to end as it began. Thus it is that a question,
plausible to appearance, may contain within it capacities of
misunderstanding, cross-purposes, and pointless issues, sufficient to
occupy the long night of Pandemonium, or beguile the journey to the
nearest fixed star.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 12: An Address, delivered on the 28th of March, 1877, to the
Edinburgh University Philosophical Society. CONTEMPORARY REVIEW, April,
1877.]

[Footnote 13: This very plausible utterance begs every question. There
would be some difficulty in condensing an equal amount of fallacy,
confusion of thought, in so few words.

In the first place, it assumes that the three requisites--health,
freedom from debt, and a good conscience--are matters of easy and
general attainment; that they are, in fact, the rule among human beings.
Is this really so?

Take Health, a word of very wide import. Ther