that the attitude is absurd.

Hegel made famous his aphorism that all the rational is real and all the
real rational; but there are many of us who, unconvinced by Hegel,
continue to believe that the real, the really real, is irrational, that
reason builds upon irrationalities. Hegel, a great framer of
definitions, attempted with definitions to reconstruct the universe,
like that artillery sergeant who said that cannon were made by taking a
hole and enclosing it with steel.

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,