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 analogical 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.