They discussed and debated the question all day; but while they hesitated over the reprieve, the prisoner was beyond the law.
Somebody insisted that the question would have to be debated, which meant that everybody would have to make a speech, all two thousand of them.
The existence and justification of such beliefs--for the inductive principle, as we shall see, is not the only example--raises some of the most difficult and most debated problems of philosophy.