, because it is finite. All arguments to God's
existence from a particular gap in our account of the world of finites are
to be rejected. They do not indicate God, they indicate the failure of our
power to analyse the world-order. When Leibniz discovered that his system
of mutual representations needed to be pre-established, he ought to have
seen that he had come up a cul-de-sac and backed out; he ought not to have
said, 'With the help of God I will leap over the wall.'

If we condemn Leibniz for writing physical theology, we condemn not him but
his age. No contemporary practice was any better, and much of it a good
deal worse, as Leibniz liked somewhat complacently to point out. And
because he comes to theology through physical theology, that does not mean
that all his theology was physical theology and as such to be written off.
On the contrary, Leibniz is led to wrestle with many problems which beset
any philosophical theism of the Christian type. This is particularly so[29]
in the _Theodicy_, as its many citations of theologians suggest. His
discussions never lack ingenuity, and the system of creation and providence
in which they result has much of that luminous serenity which colours the
best works of the Age of Reason.

Every theistic philosopher is bound, with whatever cautions, to conceive
God by the analogy of the human mind. When Leibniz declares the harmony of
monads to be pre-established by God, he is invoking the image of
intelligent human pre-arrangement. Nor is he content simply to leave it at
that: he endeavours as well as he may to conceive the sort of act by which
God pre-arranges; and this involves the detailed adaptation for theological
purposes of Leibnitian doctrine about the human mind.

The human mind, as we have seen, is the mind predominant in a certain
system of 'minds', viz. in those which constitute the members of the human
body. If we call it predominant, we mean that its system of ideas is more
developed than theirs, so that there are more points in which each of them
conforms to it than in which it conforms to any one of them. The conception
of a divine pre-establishing mind will be analogous. It will be the
conception of a mind _absolutely_ dominant, to whose ideas, that is to say,
the whole system simply corresponds, without any reciprocating
correspondence on his side. In a certain sense this is to make God the
'Mind of the World'; and yet the associations of the phrase are misleading.