Leibnitz in his theodicy represents God as limited by an antecedent reason in things which makes certain combinations logically incompatible, certain goods impossible.  He surveys in advance all the universes he might create, and by an act of what Leibnitz calls his antecedent will he chooses our actual world as the one in which the evil, unhappily necessary anyhow, is at its minimum.  It is the best of all the worlds that are possible, therefore, but by no means the most abstractly desirable world.  Having made this mental choice, God next proceeds to what Leibnitz calls his act of consequent or decretory will:  he says ‘Fiat’ and the world selected springs into objective being, with all the finite creatures in it to suffer from its imperfections without sharing in its creator’s atoning vision.

Lotze has made some penetrating remarks on this conception of Leibnitz’s, and they exactly fall in with what I say of the absolutist conception.  The world projected out of the creative mind by the fiat, and existing in detachment from its author, is a sphere of being where the parts realize themselves only singly.  If the divine value of them is evident only when they are collectively looked at, then, Lotze rightly says, the world surely becomes poorer and not richer for God’s utterance of the fiat.  He might much better have remained contented with his merely antecedent choice of the scheme, without following it up by a creative decree.  The scheme as such was admirable; it could only lose by being translated into reality.[10] Why, I similarly ask, should the absolute ever have lapsed from the perfection of its own integral experience of things, and refracted itself into all our finite experiences?

It is but fair to recent english absolutists to say that many of them have confessed the imperfect rationality of the absolute from this point of view.  Mr. McTaggart, for example, writes:  ’Does not our very failure to perceive the perfection of the universe destroy it? ...  In so far as we do not see the perfection of the universe, we are not perfect ourselves.  And as we are parts of the universe, that cannot be perfect.’[11]

And Mr. Joachim finds just the same difficulty.  Calling the hypothesis of the absolute by the name of the ‘coherence theory of truth,’ he calls the problem of understanding how the complete coherence of all things in the absolute should involve as a necessary moment in its self-maintenance the self-assertion of the finite minds, a self-assertion which in its extreme form is error,—­he calls this problem, I say, an insoluble puzzle.  If truth be the universal fons et origo, how does error slip in?  ‘The coherence theory of truth,’ he concludes, ’may thus be said to suffer shipwreck at the very entrance of the harbor.’[12] Yet in spite of this rather bad form of irrationality, Mr. Joachim stoutly asserts his ’immediate certainty’[13] of the theory shipwrecked, the correctness of which