CREATION. Creation is the act of an infinite power that produces something without making it out of a pre-existing material. [1] It is a rather problematic question whether the doctrine of creation was supported by some pagan philosophers, or if the Jewish doctors and the Christians are the first to have taught it. Scholars are divided on this: the feeling of those who maintain the negative with respect to pagans appears the most likely. We will not fear to suggest, trusting in their works, that all the ancient philosophers believed that the original material had existed from all eternity. This appears in the fact that they did not even have any term in their languages nor any manner of speaking that expressed creation and annihilation. “Is there a single physicist,” asks Cicero, “who conceives what it is to create and to annihilate?” Aristotle, taking his speculations farther, adds that the original inhabitants of the world always judged that matter existed in itself, without dependence on any external cause. If it did, they said, we could know it only by some idea that was foreign to it, which would have no relation to it; and this idea would certainly strip matter of the title of substance which belongs to it. The eternity of matter allowed them to save God’s goodness at the expense of his power, and to explain moral and physical evil in an apparently less revolting manner. [2] “Can we believe,” asked Plato in his Timaeus , “that what is evil and disordered can be the work of God? Is he not the principle and source of all virtue, both within him and outside him? If he had found more docility in the earth, more disposition to order, he would no doubt have filled it with all sorts of good. Such is indeed his character, unless he finds invincible obstacles.” They were persuaded in general that if God had produced matter from nothing, he would have bent it to his will instead of finding it a recalcitrant subject. He had nevertheless done, so as to put order into the world, everything that his wisdom could do; but it was too much resisted, and could not prevent this aggregation of disorders that inundate the universe both with suffering, and misfortunes, to which men are subjected.

The history of the creation of the world being the basis of the law of Moses, and at the same time the seal of his mission, it is natural to believe that this dogma was universally accepted among the Jews; they even regarded as heretics, as people unworthy of living in the bosom of Israel, all who said that matter is on a level with the sovereign Being, that it is coeternal with him, and does not owe its existence to him. However, inasmuch as, despite the censures and corporal punishments even more powerful than the censures, there are always minds that are innovative and incapable of bending, three kinds of innovators had slipped in among the Jews, but they dared not declare themselves clearly until after the captivity of Babylon, where apparently they learned to disguise their opinions less. Intercourse with bold people who think freely inspires a temerity of a sort one would not find by oneself. Some maintained that a more imperfect world had preceded this one; that this one will be succeeded by an infinite number of others, each one less perfect than the one before. The duration of each world is to be 7000 years; and the proof they adduced for this, a most vain and frivolous one, is that Moses began Genesis with the letter beth , which is the second letter in the Hebrew alphabet, as if to announce that he was giving the history known only to him of the second world. Others suggested the same system, to which Spinoza has since given a geometric appearance. Finally, the last innovators, more delicate than the others, conceded the truth that angels and men, with the sublunar world, had been created; but at the same time they said that there are several worlds, all having emanated from God, all composed of considerably thickened celestial light. What is most remarkable about this system is that they put forward the following two propositions: the first, that God could not help creating several worlds, because otherwise he would not have filled the full expanse either with the name of Jehovah , which means he who exists , nor the name Adonai , which means he who commands subjects ; the other, that the origin of all these worlds could have been neither advanced nor deferred, because they all had to appear at the very time when they did appear. But the moment set by God’s wisdom is the only moment in which it is worthy of him to act. All these systems brought forth by the freethinking mind are infinitely beneath the noble simplicity which Moses was able to put into his history.

Meanwhile some Church fathers judged it appropriate to add some reflections to the Jewish legislator’s narrative, some better to reveal the power of the almighty, the others apprised of some property of numbers. “When Moses asserts,” says Saint Augustine ( book ii de civitate Dei ), [3] “that the world was created in six days, we would be wrong to imagine that God required that much time, and could not have created it all at once; but this was simply a way of signing the solemnity of his handwork.” Indeed, six has a particular distinction: it is the first number to be made up of its constituent numbers 1, 2, and 3. There are even some Jews who have adopted this position, and Philo, a writer of fairly great reputation, and skillful in knowledge of the Judaic law, considered foolish the opinion that accepts the distinction of days, which is related by Moses only in order to mark some order that gives an idea of generation.

Inasmuch as this dispute is in no way fundamental to religion, everyone may embrace whichever position seems to him most likely and for which he feels the most inclination. Nevertheless, I believe that, examining with a philosophical spirit the different opinions of momentary or successive creation , creation in an instant gives a grander idea of the power of God, who does not, like an ordinary artisan, need time and material to perfect a piece of work; he has only to say Let there be light, and there is light: Fiat lux et facta est lux . It is in this prompt obedience of the thing created that the power of the Creator manifests itself.

On this principle one could come to believe that everything God created was created in an instant, together, in the most perfect state in which it could be created. Oh Lord , said an inspired author, you have spoken, and all things were produced; you have sent your spirit, and all things came alive; no one fails to heed your voice . [4] As for Moses’s narrative, it is connected with such order and symmetry that it could also be interpreted in this manner: Everything received life and existence at the same time. But if God had wanted these things to come in succession after having endowed them with the quality of motion which was to subsist for as long as the world subsisted, this is how things would have been sorted out, distributed, and ordered. Thus the six days are but the six mutations through which matter passed to form the universe as we see it today. Moreover, the word day in almost all of Genesis ought not be taken as what we call artificial day , but only for a certain length of time; this is also to be observed in other places in Scripture where the words year , week , and day must not be taken at face value. What can further lend weight to this position is that Moses, after enumerating severally the things that were created on six different days, then reduces them to a single day, or rather to a single fixed instant. In that day, he says, God made the heaven and the earth, the grass of the fields, etc.  [5]

Where the Christian doctors are concerned, we can say in general that some of them in the early centuries are not really clear on this matter. Saint Justin the martyr, Tertullian, and Theophilus of Antioch maintained that in the formation of the world God had only recalled things to a better configuration; as he is goodness itself, says Saint Justin, he operated on a resistant, unformed subject, and made of it an artifact useful to men. Although all modern philosophers are persuaded of the truth of creation , there are yet some who see the question whether God made the world from nothing, or whether he used for it a material that existed eternally rather as a philosophical question than as a question of religion; they maintain that revelation has not spoken on this in a positive way. That is the feeling of two English authors, one of whom is Thomas Burnet and the other William Whiston. [6] They have suggested that the first chapter of Genesis contained only the history of the formation of the Earth, and not of the rest of the universe which was already extant. “Indeed,” observes Mr. Whiston, “when Moses relates that God to manifest his power created heaven and earth, he meant only the earth which we inhabit and the aerial heaven, the atmosphere which surrounds it to a certain distance. Moses then recounts that the earth was without form and void, that darkness covered the face of the deep: what more energetic description could we have of chaos? This bare planet passed through six revolutions before it received the form most suited to it. One demonstrative proof that scripture had in view only the formation of the earth is that in all the places where it speaks of the end of the earth, these passages must absolutely be interpreted only with regard to the dissolution of this same earth and of the layer of air that surrounds it. Thus the whole of the universe underwent no change with exception of our globe, where the elements were indistinct, where the principles of things were composite. Furthermore, when the historian of the Jews pronounces that heaven and the earth were created together, we must infer that this was at a previous time, but that the earth having become a chaos, God restored its original luster, its original configuration, which was something approaching a new creation .” It is certain that the boldness of the English author is striking in its way, but we must admit that there is no evidence for it.

To return to the ancient philosophers: they all believed that matter had existed from all eternity, and debated amongst themselves only over the difference of time when the configuration and the order we see in the universe had begun. This should not surprise us coming from them: they indeed believed that God himself was material. We can reduce them to three different classes: some believed that the rule and disposition which we admire today had been produced and formed by a first intelligent cause, which they held to be coeternal with matter; others thought that chance and the fortuitous combination of atoms had been, so to speak, the first workers who had given order to the universe; finally, there were several who maintained that the earth such as we see it was eternal, and that the configuration was not posterior to matter.

When we reflect on the history of the world and on all the knowledge that could be extracted from all the documentation of antiquity, it is difficult to imagine that anyone could have believed that this world had existed from all eternity. But when on the other hand we think that reason had to go all the way to creation , we can only pity the human mind to see it absorbed by a labor so beyond its abilities; it was in a strait full of abysses and precipices. For not knowing any power great enough to create the material of the universe, one necessarily had to say either that the world was from all eternity, or that matter in motion had produced it by chance. There is no middle ground; one had to decide and choose one or the other of these two extremes. It was also to this that we were reduced; and all the philosophers except those who attributed the formation of the universe to the motion of atoms believed that the world was eternal.

Censorinus, in his treatise on the birth day, [7] speaking of the eternity of the world, says that this opinion was followed by Pythagoras, Lucan, and Archytas of Tarentum, all Pythagorean philosophers; but also, he adds, Plato, Xenocrates, and Dicaearchus of Messana, and all the philosophers of the ancient academy had no different positions. Aristotle, Theophrastus, and several famous Peripatetics wrote the same thing, and gave reasons for it: first, that God and Nature would not always be what is best if the universe were not eternal, since God, having judged from all time that the configuration of the world was good, would have put off producing it for all eternity; second, that it is impossible to decide whether birds existed before there were eggs, or eggs before birds. And so they concluded that, the world being eternal, all things had been and would be in a mutual vicissitude of generations. The Greek philosophers had been anticipated by the Egyptians in the opinion of the eternity of the world, and perhaps the Egyptians too had been anticipated by other peoples we know nothing of. But we can learn nothing about them, for it is in Egypt that we discover the first traces of philosophy. The priests were those most devoted to the quest, but in general all Egyptians believed in and accepted two initial and eternal deities, the sun and the moon, which governed the whole universe. Although this system did not assume entirely that the world was eternal, still it came very close to Aristotle’s by assuming the eternity of the sun and moon. It was much less absurd than the one that made chance the cause of the configuration of the universe, whereas the two first intelligent principles which the Egyptians assumed made them easily find the cause of order and its continuation. They were no longer surprised at the precision we perceive in the course of the heavenly bodies and the configurations of the seasons, since the rule had been made, and was still preserved by intelligent and eternal beings.

But if the system of the eternity of the world was more consistent and better thought out than that of the Epicureans, the Epicureans’ system had many advantages over the other, furnished by the perceptible vestiges encountered everywhere of the youth and newness of the world. To resolve the difficulty, they had recourse to floods and conflagrations. But nothing is more vain nor more frivolous that this response; for those inundations and conflagrations could have consumed only some countries, since a universal flood or conflagration being possible only in the supernatural order, the world would not have fallen back into its earliest infancy through those disorders. The nations preserved would have taken in those who survived these calamities, and communicated their advantages to them. Even supposing that those sad remnants of humankind had subsisted alone, and that they were engaged in repopulating the earth, they would not have forgotten the conveniences necessary to life; even had they wished to neglect the culture of the arts and sciences, houses, ships, bread, wine, laws, and religion were among those necessary things which a flood or a conflagration could not erase from the memory of men without entirely destroying humankind. We would have some remnant, some tradition, some little redoubt in history that would permit us to glimpse those inundations and conflagrations, whereas we find them only in conjectures or the lone fantasy of philosophers wedded to the system of the pretended eternity of the world. Thus one must necessarily agree that the whole history of the universe refutes this absurdity.

But why have so many able persons embraced a system so incompatible with history? The reasons for this are not difficult to find. There was no middle ground between the position of Epicurus, who attributed the formation of the universe to the fortuitous combination of atoms, and the opinion of the eternity of the world. For creation was known only by revelation; human reason had not enough power in itself to make this discovery. Thus, being reduced to the necessity of choosing an eternal world or a world formed by blind chance, they found many fewer difficulties in opting for eternity, as opposed as it was to history, against the fortuitous combination of atoms, which, bold and blind as it is, would nevertheless have formed an artifact as wise and constant as the human mind could imagine, a permanent, uniform artifact, ever conducted by a simple wisdom in its means and fruitful in its effects.

In weighing the difficulties, they found many fewer in their system, and they were right. But as on the other hand neither history nor the world’s vestiges, nor the novelty of the sciences and arts, could be brought into line with this system of eternity; pressed as they were by these objections of the Epicureans, they cut this indissoluble knot with their inundations and conflagrations invented at will and refuted by history. It is a miserable concession to impiety to have nothing but this imaginary refuge.

There were, in truth, philosophers who spoke of a spirit, of a God. But they still believed in the eternity of the world: the ones, because they could not conceive of created matter, nor how that spirit could have arranged it at will, so that this god which they accepted was a useless being without action; and the others, because they regarded the world as a consequence and a dependence of God, as heat is of the sun. The first reasoned thus: matter being uncreated, God cannot move it nor fashion anything from it, for God cannot stir matter nor configure it wisely without knowing it. Now God cannot know it if he does not give it being. For God can draw his knowledge only from himself; nothing can act in him nor illuminate him. He does not then know matter, and consequently he cannot act on it. Besides, how could he have been able to act on it, and what instruments would he have used for that?

This topic sometimes provided some sarcasm for the finest minds of paganism. Lucian, in one of his dialogues, says that there are different opinions regarding the origin of the world; some say that as there had never been a beginning, it would also have no ending; others dared to speak of the author of the universe and the manner of its formation: he could well have had the Christians in view. I admire those people, he goes on, over all others: for after assuming an author of all things, they did not add where he came from, nor where he was when he made the world, since before the birth of the universe one can imagine neither time nor place. Cicero applied himself intently to destroying the idea of the formation of the universe by an intelligent cause in his treatise on the nature of the gods, [8] which is a work written expressly to establish atheism. He says in mockery that one has recourse to a first cause to form the universe as to an asylum. Elsewhere he asks what instrument this god might have used to shape his handiwork. Aristotle also mocks Anaxagoras, and says that he uses his mens [mind] as a machine to form the world; for Anaxagoras was the first of the philosophers to speak of a mens or intelligent being to bring order to the bodies or the matter that existed from all eternity. Plato had bodies be in motion when God tried to configure them, but Plutarch, wise as he was, mocks this God of Plato’s, and asks in ironic tones if he existed when the bodies began to move. If he was, he adds, either he was awake or asleep, or he was neither. One cannot say he did not exist, for he is from all eternity. One also cannot say that he was asleep, for to sleep from all eternity is to be dead. To say he was awake, is to ask whether anything was wanting for his happiness, or whether nothing was wanting. If he needed something, he was not God. If he wanted for nothing, why make the world? If God governs the world, he adds, why does it come to pass that the evil are happy while the good are in adversity?

Others who had the action of God intervene in the configuration of the world nevertheless maintained its eternity. For, they said, it is impossible for God to do anything other than what he does, because his will is immutable and cannot undergo any change, so it cannot will anything else than what it actually does. We can attest that those are the sole reasons for impiety in all times. It is these objections which have led philosophers to speak of the eternity of the world; for being unable to understand how God could have acted to form the world, or, assuming he could act, how he would have let an eternity go by without creating it, and conceiving it moreover as a cause that acts necessarily, they came to believe that the world was eternal, despite their faith in all the histories that rejected their system.

The sophism of these arguments comes from the fact that a spiritual being is difficult to know, and that we cannot understand eternity. One wants to know what the author of the universe did during that eternity when the world did not exist. To that I reply: if by the name of God you mean a body, a material that has been in motion, your question cannot be answered; for it is impossible to picture a cause in action, a material in motion, a God making his efforts to produce the world, and being unable to form it until he has been in motion for an eternity. But if one pictures God as a spirit, one perceives that being in what we know of it by ourselves, capable of two very different acts, which is to say, of thoughts which it holds within itself, and which are its most natural acts; and a will, by which it can further produce impressions on bodies. That is his life, his action. That is what he did before he created the world by his will, just as, more or less, we see a man long at rest occupied with his own thoughts and concentrated entirely on himself. This implies no contradiction, and includes no difficulties at all comparable to those found in the system of matter that was in motion for all eternity without producing anything. The only objection that one can make comes down to saying that the comparison between a man reflecting on himself and God contained within himself is false, in that man discourses and God does not. The human mind is occupied in meditation because it goes from the known to the unknown, constructs arguments, and acquires knowledge, and because the spectacle of its thoughts is always new. Divine intelligence, on the contrary, sees in an almost indivisible instant, and in a single act, all that is intelligible. The contemplation of God is all the more idle in that he cannot even congratulate himself on being what he is. There is no philosophy to occupy him in contemplating the production of the worlds. To meditate on the production of a work is the reasonable precaution of a finite being that fears making a mistake. Therefore, we do not know what God’s thoughts were before the creation of worlds; this I concede. Therefore, there is no God: this I deny; it is poor reasoning to insert the non-existence of one thing into our ignorance of another.

But why was the world not created from all eternity? Because the world is not a necessary emanation of the deity. Eternity is the character of independence; therefore, the world had to begin. But why did it not begin earlier? This question is completely foolish, for if it is true that the world had to begin, an eternity had to precede time; and if an eternity had to precede time, one can no longer ask why God did not make the world earlier. It is visible that sooner or later are properties of time and not of eternity; and if we suppose that God would have created the world as many million years as there are grains of sand on the shores of the seas earlier than he did, could we not still ask why he had not begun earlier? Therefore, it suffices to say that an eternity had to precede it, to make it clear that it was created neither too early nor too late.

The philosophers were confounded about whether birds had existed before eggs, or eggs before birds; and being unable to decide this question, they took refuge in the eternity of the world, and maintained that there must be a sort of circle in the inseminations, and that eggs and birds had always been engendered and produced alternatively one by the other, without their species ever having either origin or beginning. When one assumes a creator of the universe, this difficulty falls at once: for we clearly conceive that he created all the species of animals that are on the earth, which then preserved themselves by procreation. But the difficulty would be much greater in assuming the eternity of the world, because the world being in motion, it seems there is a contradiction in assuming eternal motion. For every motion being successive, one part goes before the other, and that is incompatible with eternity. For example, there cannot be day and night at the same time in the same country; consequently, the night must necessarily have preceded the day, or the day must have existed first; if the night preceded the day, it follows demonstratively that the day is not eternal, since the night would have existed prior to it; the same is true of the day.

These same philosophers had recourse to the eternity of the world because they could not understand what instruments God could have used, nor how he would have acted to put the material of the universe in the order where we see it. This difficulty would also have dissipated if they had reflected alternatively on the motions of the human body which we determine by the sole act of will. We walk and we sit when we will. To go back to the first origin of this movement and this rest, we must necessarily come to the act of the will. We know well from the anatomy of the human body how this machine can make itself to move. We see bones inserted into other bones to make themselves turn and bend; we see muscles attached to these bones to pull them; we find nerves in these muscles that serve as canals for the animal spirits. We further know that these animal spirits can be determined to flow into one place rather than another by the different impressions of objects. But why does it happen that as long as the machine is well made they are always disposed to flow in the direction in which the will directs them? Incontestably, it is the sole act of my will that causes this first determination in the animal spirits: therefore, the knowledge which man has of himself gives us the notion of a cause that acts by its will. Let us apply this thought to the eternal spirit: we will see in it a cause acting by its will, and the sole instrument it has used to fashion the universe will be that will.

The superiority of the spirit [9] over the body will contribute not a little to make us understand the possibility of the creation of matter. Indeed, when we consider matter in relation to spirit, we first conceive with no trouble that matter is infinitely beneath spirit; it cannot attain it, nor approach it, nor act directly upon it; all it can do is provide it with an opportunity to form thoughts which it draws from its own resources. But when we consider spirit in relation to matter, we recognize in it a superiority and eminence of power it has over it. Spirit has two faculties, by which it knows and wills. By knowing it penetrates all the properties and actions of the body; it knows its extension or its quantity, the relationships that shapes have with one another, and composes the science of mathematics accordingly; it examines numbers and proportions with arithmetic and algebra; it considers motions and formulates rules and maxims for knowing them; in a word, it appears by the sciences that there is no body on which spirit does not perform or cannot perform its operations.

The power of spirit over body will appear even more perceptibly if one considers the will. On it depends the initial determination of the animal spirits that flow in my arm. It is already something considerable to have a very real and very positive mode of the body, like motion, which is produced by the sole act of my will. If then my will can produce a direction of motion, let us even say a motion in my body, it is not impossible for a will to produce it elsewhere; for my body is not of a different kind than others, to itself give more purchase on it by my will than another body; it is therefore not impossible for there to be a spirit which can act by its will on the universe, and produce motion there. Now if that spirit has an infinite power, nothing prevents us from conceiving that it could have created matter through its infinite power, which is its will. First, we cannot doubt that there is a Being that acts through its will: that is how our mind acts; we feel it, we are intimately persuaded of it. Moreover, there can be no obstacle coming from nothingness, for nothingness cannot act. Besides we know and feel that our will produces determinations in us, movements which were not there previously, and which it draws, so to speak, from nothingness: and so it is that taking motion, or taking matter, from nothingness is the same kind of operation, which only requires a more powerful will. If this operation of the mind is so difficult to grasp, that is because we try to picture it in the imagination; but as the imagination cannot come up with a notion of nothingness, we must necessarily, as long as we make use of this faculty, picture a subject upon which one will act; and that is so true that we have set as a maxim that one must approach and touch this subject upon which one acts: Nemo agit in distans [No one acts at a distance]. But if we silence the senses and the imagination, we find that these two maxims are false. When I say, for example, that from nothing one can make nothing , where is, I ask you, the subject on which my mind is presently performing? Similarly, when we pay attention to the operation of a will, we clearly conceive that it must itself produce its subject, far from assuming a subject in order to act. For what is an act of will? It is not an emanation of the body, that can or must touch another body in order to act; it is a purely spiritual act, incapable of touching and movement: it must therefore necessarily produce its own effect, which is its own subject. I want to move my arm, and at that moment a little lock opens which lets the spirits flow into the nerves and muscles, which cause the movement of my arm. I ask who caused the opening of that little lock? Without a doubt, it is the act of my will. How did it open it? For this act is not a body, it could not touch it. It must then necessarily have produced it by its own properties [ vertu ].

Let us presently consider an infinite and all-powerful will: will we not have to say that, as I conceive that I walk by virtue of an act of my will, matter as well must exist by an operation of that all-powerful will? A being which has all the perfections must necessarily have that of doing and producing whatever it wills.

The famous axion: Nothing can be made from nothing is true in a certain sense, but it is entirely false in the sense in which atheists take it. Here are the three sense in which it is true: 1. Nothing can come by itself from nothingness without an efficient cause. From this principle follows this truth: that all that exists has not been made, but there is something that exists necessarily and by itself; for if everything had been made, it would result necessarily that some being had made itself, or came of itself from nothingness. 2. Nothing can be produced from nothingness by an efficient cause which is not at the least as perfect as its effect, and which has not the force to act and to produce. 3. Nothing of what is produced from pre-existent matter can have any real entity that was not contained in that matter; so all generations are only mixtures or new modifications of beings that already were. These are the senses in which it is impossible for anything to be made of nothing, and which can be reduced to this general maxim: that nothingness can be neither the efficient cause nor the material cause of anything. This is an incontestable truth, but which, far from being contrary to the creation or the existence of God, serves to prove them in an invincible manner.

Indeed, if it were true in general that no being can begin to exist, there could be no cause that did anything at all; there would be no action nor any motion in the corporeal world, and consequently no generation nor any change. But we bear in ourselves the experience of the contrary, since we have the power to produce new thoughts in our soul, new movements in our body, and modifications in bodies which are outside us. It is true that the atheists limit their assertion to substances, and further say that there can be new accidents, yet there cannot nevertheless be new substances; but fundamentally they cannot give any solid reason why one is more impossible than the other, or why there can be any being that could make new substances. What produces this prejudice is the confused thoughts one borrows from the production of artificial things, where everything is made from a pre-existing matter to which one simply gives new modifications. We persuade ourselves inappropriately that what is true of our productions is true of the productions of an infinite Being; from this we conclude that there is no power in the universe that can do what is impossible for us, as if we were the measure of all beings. But since it is certain that imperfect beings can themselves produce something, such as new thoughts, new movements, and new modifications in bodies, it is reasonable to believe that the sovereignly perfect Being goes farther, and that he can produce substances. We even have reason to believe that it is as simple for God to make an entire world as for us to move a finger: for to say that a substance begins to exist by the power of God is not to produce something from nothingness in the senses that we have recognized above as impossible. It is true that infinite power does not extend to what implies contradiction; but this is precisely where the adversaries of creation are defied to prove that although it is not impossible to produce an accident or a modification from nothingness, it is absolutely impossible to create a substance: that they will never demonstrate.

2. If nothing can be produced from nothingness in the sense we are maintaining, then all the substances in the universe must exist not only from all eternity, but even necessarily and independently of any cause. Now one can say that that is effectively to produce something from nothingness, in the natural sense in which that is impossible, in other words making nothingness the cause of something: for as when atheists assure that nothing can move itself, and assume at the same time that motion has been from all eternity, that is to produce motion from nothingness in the sense in which it is impossible. Likewise, those who make substances exist of themselves without necessary existence being part of their nature, are producing the existence of substances from nothingness.

3. If all substances were eternal, it would not be only matter or atoms devoid of qualities which would perhaps exist in themselves from all eternity; it would also be souls. There is no even slightly reasonable man who can imagine that he himself, or that which thinks in him, is not a real being, while he sees that the least grain of powder carried off by the wind is one. It is visible also that the soul cannot arise from matter devoid of sentiment and life, and that it could not be a modification of it. Thus, if no substance can be produced from nothingness, It must be that all human souls, as well as matter and atoms, have existed not only from all eternity, but also independently of any other being. But the atheists are so far from believing in the eternity of the human soul that they are unwilling in any fashion to accept its immortality; if they admitted that there are immortal intelligent beings, they would be in danger of having to recognize a Deity.

4. Matter is not coeternal with God, whence it follows that it was created. Here is proof of that. Either matter is infinite in its extension, so there is no space which is not filled with it; or it is limited in its extension, so it does not fill all parts of space. Now whether it be finite or infinite in its extension, it does not exist necessarily. First of all, if it is finite, it is ipso facto contingent. Why? Because if a being exists necessarily, one can no more conceive of its nonexistence than it is possible to conceive of a circle without its being round, present existence being no less essential to the being that exists necessarily than being round is to the circle. Now if matter is finite, and does not fill all spaces, ipso facto one can conceive of its nonexistence. If we can conceive of its absence from some parts of space, we can assume the same thing for all parts of space; there is no reason why it should exist in one part of space rather than any other; therefore, if it does not exist necessarily in all parts of space, it will not exist necessarily in any, and consequently if matter is finite, it could not exist necessarily. It remains therefore to say that eternity is compatible with matter only insofar as it is infinite, and fills all parts of space, so that the smallest void would be impossible. Now I maintain that matter considered from this last vantage point cannot exist necessarily. Here is the basis for my thought. The matter that makes up the world must be capable of motion, since motion is the soul and driving force of this vast universe. Now once you have accepted an infinitely diffuse material that fills all parts of space, motion becomes impossible. I could bring to bear here all the reasons that are alleged against the Cartesians, who absolutely banish the vacuum from the universe, and try to reconcile motion with the plenum. But that is not what is at issue. The Cartesians themselves will be the first to grant me that if matter exists necessarily, motions could not be introduced into it in any way possible; for whence could motion arise in it? Either it would be inherent in its nature, or it would be impressed on it by some cause distinct from itself; but there is no way one can say either. Whether motion is natural to it, or it was received from God, it hardly matters; what is certain is that this motion, once introduced into matter, will affect the parts that compose it, transport them from one place to another, place them variously relative to each other, in a word form various combinations with them. Now if matter is infinite and exists necessarily, all these displacements and all these combinations, natural effects of motion, will become impossible: the reason is that each part of matter will exist necessarily in the part of space it occupies. It is not chance that will have placed it there rather than elsewhere, nor in the neighborhood of such parts rather than of others; the same reason that makes it exist necessarily also makes it exist in one place rather than elsewhere. It is here that the sufficient reason of Mr. Leibniz occurs. Therefore, if matter exists necessarily, motion becomes impossible.

Creation from nothing is therefore compatible with reason; it raises the power of God to the highest level, and extirpates atheism to its very roots. This article is in large part by Mr. Formey.

1. It is not so much the creation story as related in Genesis 1 and 2 that is primarily addressed in this article as the broad philosophical question of whether matter was created or has always existed.

2. An allusion to the intractable problem of the existence of evil, for which Leibniz had coined the term “Theodicy” ( Théodicé , 1710). See Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibniz (1646-1716), Essais de Théodicé sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l’homme et l’origine du mal (Amsterdam 1747), with an introduction by Jaucourt.

3. De civitate dei . In English translation: Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (Edinburgh, 1884).

4. Judith 16:17.

5. It is not clear to exactly what passage this assertion is meant to refer.

6. Thomas Burnet (1635–1715) published Telluris Theoria Sacra in 1681; for a later English version: The Theory of the Earth (London, 1697). William Whiston (1667–1752), published A New Theory of the Earth in 1696. The link is to the second edition, published in 1708.

7. De die natali .

8. De deorum natura .

9. Esprit : it is useful to keep in mind that in some passages a translation cannot usefully distinguish between “mind” and “spirit”: throughout this article there is no real separation.