384.  The late Herr Erhard Weigel, a celebrated mathematician and philosopher at Jena, well known for his Analysis Euclidea, his mathematical philosophy, some neat mechanical inventions, and finally the trouble he took to induce the Protestant princes of the Empire to undertake the last reform of the Almanac, whose success, notwithstanding, he did not witness; Herr Weigel, I say, communicated to his friends a certain demonstration of the existence of God, which indeed amounted to this idea of continued creation.  As he was wont to draw parallels between reckoning and reasoning—­witness his Arithmetical Ethics (rechenschaftliche Sittenlehre)—­he said that the foundation of the demonstration was this beginning of the Pythagorean Table, once one is one.  These repeated unities were the moments of the existence of things, each one of them depending upon God, who resuscitates, as it were, all things outside himself at each moment:  falling away as they do at each moment, they must ever have one who shall resuscitate them, and that cannot be any other than God.  But there would be need of a more exact proof if that is to be called a demonstration.  It would be necessary to prove that the creature always emerges from nothingness and relapses thither forthwith.  In particular it must be shown that the privilege of enduring more than a moment by its nature belongs to the necessary being alone.  The difficulties on the composition of the continuum enter also into this matter.  This dogma appears to resolve time into moments, whereas others regard moments and points as mere modalities of the continuum, that is, as extremities of the parts that can be assigned to it, and not as constituent parts.  But this is not the place for entering into that labyrinth.

385.  What can be said for certain on the present subject is that the creature depends continually upon divine operation, and that it depends upon that no less after the time of its beginning than when it first begins.  This dependence implies that it would not continue to exist if God did not continue to act; in short, that this action of God is free.  For if it were a necessary emanation, like that of the properties of the circle, which issue from its essence, it must then be said that God in the beginning produced the creature by necessity; or else it must be shown how, in creating it once, he imposed upon himself the necessity of conserving it.  Now there is no reason why this conserving action should not be [356] called production, and even creation, if one will:  for the dependence being as great afterwards as at the beginning, the extrinsic designation of being new or not does not change the nature of that action.