logical 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 [31]
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_.

Leibni