  This introduces a further feature of Du Châtelet's PC in addition to those identified above. The PC, in the case of simple beings, establishes both the necessary existence and nature of simple beings. That is, simple beings are necessarily unextended (their nature), and they necessarily must exist so as to explain the fact of existing composed, extended beings—a fact established by our experience that such composed beings do indeed exist. But this is what we might call a hypothetical necessity (as opposed to what we might call an absolute necessity). That is, these necessary facts about the simple beings of our world obtain only on the hypothesis that our world actually does exist. God could have not created our world, and had he so chosen to not create any world, then simple beings which actually exist (with the nature of being unextended) need not have existed at all.