Of createdness, or pre-establishedness, there is no more to be said: we can think of it as nothing but the pure or absolute case of subjection to dominant mind. It is no use asking further how God's thoughts are obeyed in the existence and action of things. What we can and must enquire into further, is the nature of the divine thoughts which are thus obeyed. They must be understood to be volitions or decrees. There are indeed two ways in which things obey the divine thought, and correspondingly two sorts of divine
thoughts that they obey. In so far as created things conform to the mere universal principles of reason, they obey a reasonableness which is an inherent characteristic of the divine mind itself. If God wills the existence of any creature, that creature's existence must observe the limits prescribed by eternal reason: it cannot, for example, both have and lack a certain characteristic in the same sense and at the same time; nor can it contain two parts and two parts which are not also countable as one part and three parts. Finite things, if they exist at all, must thus conform to the reasonableness of the divine nature, but what the divine reasonableness thus prescribes is highly general: we can deduce from it only certain laws which any finite things must obey, we can never deduce from it which finite things there are to be, nor indeed that there are to be any. Finite things are particular and individual: each of them might have been other than it is or, to speak more properly, instead of any one of them there might have existed something else; it was, according to the mere principles of eternal reason, equally possible. But if so, the whole universe, being made up of things each of which might be otherwise, might as a whole be otherwise. Therefore the divine thoughts which it obeys by existing have the nature of choices or decrees.
What material does the finite mind supply for an analogical picture of the infinite mind making choices or decrees? If we use such language of God, we are using language which has its first and natural application to ourselves. We all of us choose, and those of us who are in authority make decrees. What is to choose? It involves a real freedom in the mind. A finite mind, let us remember, is nothing but a self-operating succession of perceptions, ideas, or representations. With regard to some of our ideas we have no freedom, those, for example, which represent to us our body. We think of them as constituting our given substance. They are sheer datum for us, and so are those reflexions of our environment which they mediate to us. They make up a closely packed and confused mass; they persevere in their being with an obstinate innate force, the spiritual counterpart of the force which we have to recognize in things as physically interpreted. Being real spiritual force, it is quasi-voluntary, and indeed do we not love our own existence and, in a sense, will it in all its necessary circumstances? But if we can be said to will to be ourselves and to enact with native force what our body and its environment makes
us, we are merely willing to conform to the conditions of our existence; we are making no choice. When, however, we think freely or perform deliberate acts, there is not only force but choice in our activity. Choice between what? Between alternative possibilities arising out of our situation. And choice in virtue of what? In virtue of the appeal exercised by one alternative as seemingly better.
Can we adapt our scheme of choice to the description of God's creative decrees? We will take the second point in it first: our choice is in virtue of the appeal of the seeming best. Surely the only corrective necessary in applying this to God is the omission of the word 'seeming'. His choice is in virtue of the appeal of the simply best. The other point causes more trouble. We choose between possibilities which arise for us out of our situation in the system of the existing world. But as the world does not exist before God's creative choices, he is in no world-situation, and no alternative possibilities can arise out of it, between which he should have to choose. But if God does not choose between intrinsic possibilities of some kind, his choice becomes something absolutely meaningless to us—it is not a choice at all, it is an arbitrary and unintelligible fiat.
Leibniz's solution is this: what are mere possibilities of thought for us are possibilities of action for God. For a human subject, possibilities of action are limited to what arises out of his actual situation, but possibilities for thought are not so limited. I can conceive a world different in many respects from this world, in which, for example, vegetables should be gifted with thought and speech; but I can do nothing towards bringing it about. My imaginary world is practically impossible but speculatively possible, in the sense that it contradicts no single principle of necessary and immutable reason. I, indeed, can explore only a very little way into the region of sheer speculative possibility; God does not explore it, he simply possesses it all: the whole region of the possible is but a part of the content of his infinite mind. So among all possible creatures he chooses the best and creates it.
But the whole realm of the possible is an actual infinity of ideas. Out of the consideration of an infinity of ideas, how can God arrive at a choice? Why not? His mind is not, of course, discursive; he does not successively turn over the leaves of an infinite book of sample worlds, for then he would never come to the end
of it. Embracing infinite possibility in the single act of his mind, he settles his will with intuitive immediacy upon the best. The inferior, the monstrous, the absurd is not a wilderness through which he painfully threads his way, it is that from which he immediately turns; his wisdom is his elimination of it.
But in so applying the scheme of choice to God's act, have we not invalidated its application to our own? For if God has chosen the whole form and fabric of the world, he has chosen everything in it, including the choices we shall make. And if our choices have already been chosen for us by God, it would seem to follow that they are not real open choices on our part at all, but are pre-determined. And if they are pre-determined, it would seem that they are not really even choices, for a determined choice is not a choice. But if we do not ourselves exercise real choice in any degree, then we have no clue to what any choice would be: and if so, we have no power of conceiving divine choice, either; and so the whole argument cuts its own throat.
There are two possible lines of escape from this predicament. One is to define human choice in such a sense that it allows of pre-determination without ceasing to be choice; and this is Leibniz's method, and it can be studied at length in the Theodicy. He certainly makes the very best he can of it, and it hardly seems that any of those contemporaries whose views he criticizes was in a position to answer him. The alternative method is to make the most of the negative element involved in all theology. After all, we do not positively or adequately understand the nature of infinite creative will. Perhaps it is precisely the transcendent glory of divine freedom to be able to work infallibly through free instruments. But so mystical a paradox is not the sort of thing we can expect to appeal to a late-seventeenth-century philosopher.