Another man, the man Joseph Butler, the Anglican bishop who lived at the beginning of the eighteenth century and whom Cardinal Newman declared to be the greatest man in the Anglican Church, wrote, at the conclusion of the first chapter of his great work, The Analogy of Religion, the chapter which treats of a future life, these pregnant words:  “This credibility of a future life, which has been here insisted upon, how little soever it may satisfy our curiosity, seems to answer all the purposes of religion, in like manner as a demonstrative proof would.  Indeed a proof, even a demonstrative one, of a future life, would not be a proof of religion.  For, that we are to live hereafter, is just as reconcilable with the scheme of atheism, and as well to be accounted for by it, as that we are now alive is:  and therefore nothing can be more absurd than to argue from that scheme that there can be no future state.”

The man Butler, whose works were perhaps known to the man Kant, wished to save the belief in the immortality of the soul, and with this object he made it independent of belief in God.  The first chapter of his Analogy treats, as I have said, of the future life, and the second of the government of God by rewards and punishments.  And the fact is that, fundamentally, the good Anglican bishop deduces the existence of God from the immortality of the soul.  And as this deduction was the good Anglican bishop’s starting-point, he had not to make that somersault which at the close of the same century the good Lutheran philosopher had to make.  Butler, the bishop, was one man and Kant, the professor, another man.

To be a man is to be something concrete, unitary, and substantive; it is to be a thing—­res.  Now we know what another man, the man Benedict Spinoza, that Portuguese Jew who was born and lived in Holland in the middle of the seventeenth century, wrote about the nature of things.  The sixth proposition of Part III. of his Ethic states:  unaquoeque res, quatenus in se est, in suo esse perseverare conatur—­that is, Everything, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persist in its own being.  Everything in so far as it is in itself—­that is to say, in so far as it is substance, for according to him substance is id quod in se est et per se concipitur—­that which is in itself and is conceived by itself.  And in the following proposition, the seventh, of the same part, he adds:  conatus, quo unaquoeque res in suo esse perseverare conatur, nihil est proeter ipsius rei actualem essentiam—­that is, the endeavour wherewith everything endeavours to persist in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself.  This means that your essence, reader, mine, that of the man Spinoza, that of the man Butler, of the man Kant, and of every man who is a man, is nothing but the endeavour, the effort, which he makes to continue to be a man, not to die.  And the other proposition which follows these two,