y 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 v