For Newton and his colleagues, matter was brute, inert, stupid stuff, and as such had to be set in motion by the external power of the divine will...in the Newtonian view, spiritual forces rule Nature from above rather as monarchs and despots govern their states. For the radical lineage stemming from Spinoza , by contrast, there is no call for such august authorities. Matter itself is alive and self-determining, like the populace of a democratic state...It is thus that one can speak of a politics of matter. To be a materialist in this sense is to invest human beings with a degree of dignity by seeing them as part of a material world which is identical with the Almighty. Such, at least, was the view of the pantheistic Spinoza. (p3, edited a bit)
The endeavor to persist in its own being is the essence of the individual thing.