ont 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.

386. Let us then admit in such a sense that conservation is a continued
creation, and let us see what M. Bayle seems to infer thence (p. 771) after
the author of the _Reflexion on the Picture of Socinianism_, in opposition
to M. Jurieu. 'It seems to me', this writer says, 'that one mu