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. There is a certain small amount, such as is marked by being out of the physician's hands, but implying very little of the energy needed for the labours and the enjoyment of life. There is a high and resplendent degree that renders toil easy, and responds to the commonest stimulants, so that enjoyment cannot be quashed without unusually unfavourable circumstances. The first kind is widely diffused; the second is very rare, except in the earlier portion of life. Most men and women, as they pass middle age, lose the elasticity required for easy and spontaneous enjoyment, and, even if they keep the appearance of health, have too little animal spirits for enjoyment under cheap and ordinary excitements. But there is more to be said. In order to obtain, and to retain, health, freedom from debt, and a good conscience, there are pre-supposed very considerable advantages. We cannot continue healthy and out of debt, unless we have a fair start in life, that is, unless we have a tolerable provision to begin with; a circumstance that the maxim keeps out of sight.