  Leibniz is committed to the view that, given God’s perfection, anything God creates must also be perfect—this is why the created world is the best possible world. This means that a large part of his writings are theodicean in spirit. Leibniz shares this spirit with his close contemporary, Anne Conway. Conway’s system is motivated by her desire to reject Cartesian dualism, Spinozism, and Hobbesian materialism. On her view, any commitment to the existence of material substance is a commitment to the existence of “dead mass”. Any such view is gravely mistaken. For, she holds that nature is shot through with the “vital principle of motion”, which has life and perception, qualities befitting any creation of God (Chapter IX, section 2). Conway thus rejects Descartes’s dualism, while nevertheless noting that because he accepts the immateriality of God, he is at least better than Hobbes, who holds that God is material. Finally, she registers that her disagreement with Spinoza has to do with his monism, which effaces any distinction between God and creatures (Chapter IX, section 3).