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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.
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