fect already their innumerable imperfect manners of seeing the same
spectacle? Suppose the entire universe to consist of one superb copy
of a book, fit for the ideal reader. Is that universe improved or
deteriorated by having myriads of garbled and misprinted separate
leaves and chapters also created, giving false impressions of the book
to whoever looks at them? To say the least, the balance of rationality
is not obviously in favor of such added mutilations. So this question
becomes urgent: Why, the absolute's own total vision of things
being so rational, was it necessary to comminute it into all these
coexisting inferior fragmentary visions?

Leibnitz in his theodicy represents God as limited by an antecedent
reason in things which makes certain combinations logically
incompatible, certain goods impossible. He surveys in advance all the
universes he might create, and by an act of what Leibnitz calls his
antecedent will he chooses our actual world as the one in which the
evil, unhappily necessary anyhow, is at its minimum. It is the best of
all the worlds that are possible, therefore, but by no means the most
abstractly desirable world. Having made this mental choice, God next
proceeds to what Leibnitz calls his act of consequent or decretory
will: he says '_Fiat_' and the world selected springs into objective
being, with all the finite creatures in it to suffer from its
imperfections without sharing in its creator's atoning vision.

Lotze has made some penetrating remarks on this conception of
Leibnitz's, and they exactly fall in with what I say of the absolutist
conception. The world projected out of the creative mind by the
_fiat_, and existing in detachment from its author, is a sphere of
being where the parts realize themselves only singly. If the divine
value of them is evident only when they are collectively looked at,
then, Lotze rightly says, the world surely becomes poorer and not
richer for God's utterance of the _fiat_. He might much better have
remained contented with his merely antecedent choice of the scheme,
without following it up by a creative decree. The scheme _as such_ was
admirable; it could only lose by being translated into reality.[10]
Why, I similarly ask, should the absolute ever have lapsed from the
perfection of its own integral experience of things, and refracted
itself into all our finite experiences?

It is but fair to recent english absolutists to say that many of them
have confessed