 Sturm’s emphasis on forms has its counterpart in his marginalization of the role that the laws of nature play in his natural philosophy and in scientific explanations. Sturm puts forward only two very general laws, one concerning the communication of motion (PE I: 164) and the other concerning the mind-body union (PE I: 858–859). Focusing on the conservation of motion, it is important to stress that this law is not supposed to explain what specific features different specific bodies can have, nor does Sturm ever suggest that the variety of finite things could follow from a consideration of this (or any other) law alone. Rather, the law of the conservation of the quantity of motion simply constrains the effects of every natural phenomenon (namely, the fact that motion cannot be dissipated during impacts but must be always conserved in the whole of the universe). Remarkably, Sturm also mentions that this law is not deduced a priori from purely metaphysical considerations (as is the case in Descartes’ deduction of conservation from the nature of God’s immutability), but rather only a posteriori on the basis of empirical observations. As an empirical regularity derived from experience, Sturm’s conservation law does not have the same strong metaphysical connotations of Malebranche’s laws of nature (which are grounded in a consideration of God’s attributes of simplicity and wisdom), nor does it play any significant role in the explanation of particular phenomena.