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.  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: