Our life afflicted with incessant paine,
That nought on earth may lessen or appease.
Why then should I desire here to remaine?
Or why should he that loves me, sorie bee
For my deliverence, or at all complaine
My good to hear, and tóward joyes to see?
Edmund Spenser (Daphnaïda).
Tóward, “approaching.”
My closing remark is as to avoiding debates that are in their very nature interminable.... 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, and unsettled terms. 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.