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VI. 7. 1]
MULTIPLICITY OF THE IDEAL-FORMS
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souls in order to their entry into process, then it is of their very nature to belong to process, unnatural to them to be outside of process and within the Intellectual: they were made in the intent that they should belong to the alien and have their being amid evil; the divine provision would consist in holding them to their disaster; this is God's reasoned purpose, this the plan entire.

Now what is the foundation of reasoned plan?

Precedent planning, it may be; but still we are forced back to some thing or things determining it. What would these be here?

Either sense-perception or intellect. But sense-perception it cannot in this case be: intellect is left; yet, starting from intellect, the conclusion will be knowledge, not therefore the handling of the sensible; what begins with the intellectual and proceeds to the intellectual can certainly not end in dealings with the sensible. Providence, then, whether over living beings or over any part of the universe was never the outcome of plan.

There is in fact no planning There; we speak of reasoned purpose in the world of things only to convey that the universe is of the character which in the later order would point to a wise purposing; Providence implies that things are as in the later order a competent foreplanning would produce them. Reasoning serves, in beings not of the order above that need, to supply for the higher power; foresight is necessary in the lack of power which could dispense with it; it labours towards some one occurrence in preference to another and it goes in a sort of dread of the unfitting; where only the fitting can occur, there is no foreseeing. So with planning; where one only of two things can be, what place is there for plan? The alone and one and utterly simplex cannot involve a "this to avert that": if the "this" could not be, the "that" must; the serviceable thing appeared and at once approved itself so.

But surely this is foreseeing, deliberating: are we not back at what was said at the beginning, that God did to this end give both the senses and the powers, however perplexing that giving be?

No: all turns on the necessary completeness of Act; we cannot think anything belonging to God to be other than a whole and all and