sing to be choice; and this is Leibniz's method, and it can be
studied at length in the _Theodicy_. He certainly makes the very best he
can of it, and it hardly seems that any of those contemporaries whose views
he criticizes was in a position to answer him. The alternative method is to
make the most of the negative element involved in all theology. After all,
we do not positively or adequately understand the nature of infinite
creative will. Perhaps it is precisely the transcendent glory of divine
freedom to be able to work infallibly through free instruments. But so
mystical a paradox is not the sort of thing we can expect to appeal to a
late-seventeenth-century philosopher.

One criticism of Leibniz's argument we cannot refrain from making. He
allows himself too easy a triumph when he says that the only alternative to
a choice determined by a prevailing inclination towards one proposal is a
choice of mere caprice. There is a sort of choice Leibniz never so much as
considers and which appears at least to fall quite outside his categories,
and that is the sort of choice exercised in artistic creativity. In such
choice we freely feel after the shaping of a scheme, we do not arbitrate
simply between shaped and given possible schemes. And perhaps some such
element enters into all our choices, since our life is to some extent [33]
freely designed by ourselves. If so, our minds are even more akin to the
divine mind than Leibniz realized. For the sort of choice we are now
referring to seems to be an intuitive turning away from an infinite, or at
least indefinite, range of less attractive possibility. And such is the
nature of the divine creative choice. The consequence of such a line of
speculation would be, that the divine mind designs more through us, and
less simply for us, than Leibniz allowed: the 'harmony' into which we enter
would be no longer simply 'pre-established'. Leibniz, in fact, could have
nothing to do with such a suggestion, and he would have found it easy to be
ironical about it if his contemporaries had proposed it.

II

Leibniz wrote two books; a considerable number of articles in learned
periodicals; and an enormous number of unpublished notes, papers and
letters, preserved in the archives of the Electors of Hanover not because
of the philosophical significance of some of them, but because of the
political importance of most of them. From among this great mass various
excerpts of philosophical interest