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