metaphysical strictness there is no being but God; that entity is the
greatest and only good; and that God as infinite entity, wherein the
agreement of being with being is absolute, is the supreme excellency,
the supreme good. It seems certain that these conclusions were
independent of Berkeley and Malebranche, and were not drawn from
Arthur Collier's _Clavis universalis_ (1713), with which they have
much in common, but were suggested, in part at least, by Locke's
doctrine of ideas, Newton's theory of colours, and Cudworth's
Platonism, with all of which Edwards was early familiar. But they were
never developed systematically, and the conception of the material
universe here contended for does not again explicitly reappear in any
of his writings. The fundamental metaphysical postulate that being and
God are ultimately identical remained, however, the philosophical
basis of all his thinking, and reverence for this being as the supreme
good remained the fundamental disposition of his mind. That he did not
interpret this idea in a Spinozistic sense was due to his more
spiritual conception of "being" and to the reaction on his philosophy
of his theology. The theological interest, indeed, came in the end to
predominate, and philosophy to appear as an instrument for the defence
of Calvinism. Perhaps the best criticism of Edwards's philosophy as a
whole is that, instead of being elaborated on purely rational
principles, it is mixed up with a system of theological conceptions
with which it is never thoroughly combined, and that it is exposed to
all the disturbing effects of theological controversy. Moreover, of
one of his most central convictions, that of the sovereignty of God in
election, he confesses that he could give no account.

Edwards's reputation as a thinker is chiefly associated with his
treatise on the Will, which is still sometimes called "the one large
contribution that America has made to the deeper philosophic thought
of the world." The aim of this treatise was to refute the doctrine of
free-will, since he considered it the logical, as distinguished from
the sentimental, ground of most of the Arminian objections to
Calvinism. He defines the will as that by which the "mind chooses
anything." To act voluntarily, he says, is to act electively. So far
he and his opponents are agreed. But choice, he holds, is not
arbitrary; it is determined in ev