Tragic Sense Of Life by Miguel de Unamuno
page 39 of 397 (09%)
page 39 of 397 (09%)
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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, the eighth, says: _conatus, quo unaquoeque res in suo esse perseverare conatur, nullum tempus finitum, sed indefinitum involvit_--that is, The endeavour whereby each individual thing endeavours to persist involves no finite time but indefinite time. That is to say that you, I, and Spinoza wish |
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