The Debater's Handbook of Controversial Topics

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION. I our country. Literary and Debating Societies are favourite forms in which intelligent young men endeavour to provide themselves with the delight and profit to be derived from genial intellectual companionship. The social and educative influences which such associations of earnest young minds, whose investigative faculties are all on the alert, set in activity in a district, are capable of effecting results full of benefit, not to their members alone, but to all with whom they are brought into contact. Just at that period of life when the docility of youth is stirred to questioning by the quickness of the freshly active reasoning faculties, these societies supply at once a stimulant to reflection, and a repression of egotism, in the reciprocal inter-activity of thought they induce, and in the scope they afford at once for the exercises of individual energy of mind, and the immediate subjection of all the results of such efforts to social criticism; in the sense of duty they interfuse with life, and the training to bear investigation they impart. They constitute a sort of intellectual volunteer corps, whose drill enlivens life, infuses spirit, excites activity, assists perseverance and promotes competitive progress; and whose arrangements are such as to train and exercise the minds of their members in the courteous use of speech, the proper conduct of the understanding, and the practical observance of the social amenities. Simple as their agencies are, and loose as their form may seem, they succeed in a great measure in preparing the mind for the defence of the opinions it has reached, and for offering defiance to many of the more palpable sophistries which are employed by astute proselytizers to misfead the unwary and the unpractised. The intellectual gladiatorsh...