It suggests that the world is an organism or body in which the divine mind
is incarnate, and on which he relies for his representations. But that is
nonsense; the world is not _a_ body, nor is it organic to God. Absolute
dominance involves absolute transcendence: if everything in the world
without remainder simply obeys the divine thoughts, that is only another
way of saying that the world is the creature of God; the whole system is
pre-established by him who is absolute Being and perfectly independent of
the world.

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 [30]
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 ana