simply analysing nature and finding it to be a system of mutual
representation; he was analysing mutual representation and finding it to be
of its nature intrinsically pre-established, and therefore God-dependent.
He was not adding anything to mutual representation, he was just showing
what it necessarily contained or implied. At least he was doing nothing
worse than recognized scholastic practice. Scholastic Aristotelianism
explained all natural causality as response to stimulus, and then had to
postulate a stimulus which stimulated without being stimulated, and this
was God. Apart from this supreme and first stimulus nothing would in fact
be moving. The Aristotelians claimed simply to be analysing the nature of
physical motion as they perceived it, and to find the necessity of
perpetually applied divine stimulation implicit in it. No violence was
thereby done to the system of physical motion nor was anything brought in
from without to patch it up; it was simply found to be of its own [28]
nature God-dependent.

It seems as though the reproachful description _'Deus ex machina'_ should
be reserved for more arbitrary expedients than Aristotle's or Leibniz's,
say for the occasionalist theory. Occasionalism appeared to introduce God
that he might make physical matter do what it had no natural tendency to
do, viz. to obey the volitions of finite mind. Ideas, on the other hand,
have a natural tendency to represent one another, for to be an idea is to
be a representation; God is not introduced by Leibniz to make them
correspond, he is introduced to work a system in which they shall
correspond. This may not be _Deus-ex-machina philosophy_, but it is
_physical theology_; that is to say, it treats divine action as one factor
among the factors which together constitute the working of the natural
system. And this appears to be perhaps unscientific, certainly blasphemous:
God's action cannot be a factor among factors; the Creator works through
and in all creaturely action equally; we can never say 'This is the
creature, and that is God' of distinguishable causalities in the natural
world. The creature is, in its creaturely action, self-sufficient: but
because a creature, insufficient to itself throughout, and sustained by its
Creator both in existence and in action.

The only acceptable argument for theism is that which corresponds to the
religious consciousness, and builds upon the insufficiency of finite
existence throughout