ery 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 same matter when it becomes
inanimate and insensitive, is a mere rearrangement of the
same atoms, your premiss is intelligible. (It is a bolder
one than any biologists have yet advanced. The most
sceptical of them admits, I believe, that "vitality" is a
thing _per se. _However, that is beside my present
scope.) But this premiss is advanced to prove that it is of
no "consequence" to kill an animal. But, granting that the
conversion of sensitive into insensitive matter (and of
course _vice versa_) is a mere change of "form," and
_therefore_ of no "consequence"; granting this, we
cannot escape the including under this rule all similar
cases. If the _power_ of feeling pain, and the
_absence_ of that power, are only a difference of
"form," the conclusion is inevitable that the _feeling_
pain, and the _not_ feeling it, are _also_ only a
difference in form, _i.e.,_ to convert matter, which is
_not_ feeling pain, into matter _feeling_ pain, is
only to change its "form," and, if the process of "changing
form" is of no "consequence" in the case of sensitive and
insensitive matter, we must admit that it is _also_ of
no "consequence" in the case of pain-feeling and _not_
pain-feeling matter. This conclusion, I imagine, you neither
intended nor foresaw. The premiss, which you use, involves
the fallacy called "proving too much."

The best advice that could be given to you, when you begin
to compose sermons, would be what an old friend once gave to
a young man who was going out to be an Indian judge (in
India, it seems, the judge decides things, without a jury,
like our County Court judges). "Give _your decisions_
boldly and clearly; they will probably be _right_. But
do _not_ give your _reasons: they_ will probably
be _wrong"_ If your lot in life is to be in a
_country_ parish, it will perhaps not matter
_much_ whether the reasons given in your sermons do or
do not prove your conclusions. But even there you
_might_ meet, and in