cannot spend your time better than in trying to set down clearly, in that essay-form, your ideas on any subject that chances to interest you; and specially any theological subject that strikes you in the course of your reading for Holy Orders.

It will be most excellent practice for you, against the time when you try to compose sermons, to try thus to realise exactly what it is you mean, and to express it clearly, and (a much harder matter) to get into proper shape the reasons of your opinions, and to see whether they do, or do not, tend to prove the conclusions you come to.  You have never studied technical Logic, at all, I fancy. [I had, but I freely admit that the essay in question proved that I had not then learnt to apply my principles to practice.] It would have been a great help:  but still it is not indispensable:  after all, it is only the putting into rules of the way in which every mind proceeds, when it draws valid conclusions; and, by practice in careful thinking, you may get to know “fallacies” when you meet with them, without knowing the formal rules.

At present, when you try to give reasons, you are in considerable danger of propounding fallacies.  Instances occur in this little essay of yours; and I hope it won’t offend your amour propre very much, if an old uncle, who has studied Logic for forty years, makes a few remarks on it.

I am not going to enter at all on the subject-matter itself, or to say whether I agree, or not, with your conclusions:  but merely to examine, from a logic-lecturer’s point of view, your premisses as relating to them.

(1) “As the lower animals do not appear to have personality or individual existence, I cannot see that any particular one’s life can be very important,” &c.  The word “personality” is very vague:  I don’t know what you mean by it.  If you were to ask yourself, “What test should I use in distinguishing what has, from what has not, personality?” you might perhaps be able to express your meaning more clearly.  The phrase “individual existence” is clear enough, and is in direct logical contradiction to the phrase “particular one.”  To say, of anything, that it has not “individual existence,” and yet that it is a “particular one,” involves the logical fallacy called a “contradiction in terms.”

(2) “In both cases” (animal and plant) “death is only the conversion of matter from one form to another.”  The word “form” is very vague—­I fancy you use it in a sort of chemical sense (like saying “sugar is starch in another form,” where the change in nature is generally believed to be a rearrangement of the very same atoms).  If you mean to assert that the difference between a live animal and a dead animal, i.e., between animate and sensitive matter, and the