  The early influence of natural philosophers such as Gassendi and  Hobbes – whom Leibniz would later characterize as working in the  Epicurean tradition – is particularly apparent in his first  pair of systematic works on motion. In the Theoria motus  abstracti (TMA), dedicated to the French Academy in 1671,  Leibniz introduces a set of abstract laws of motion (A  VI.ii.261–276/L 139–142). At the heart of those laws is the Hobbesian notion of conatus, which Leibniz describes as “the beginning  and end of motion,” and which he seems to conceive of as a  tendency to motion in a particular direction. Leibniz argues that the motion of a body in isolation is determined entirely by its own  conatus, and that the motions of colliding bodies are determined  solely by the combination of their respective conatuses. In this way, Leibniz’s abstract theory of motion assigns no role whatsoever, with  respect to the fundamental laws of motion, to the sizes or masses of  material bodies. According to the TMA, a tiny pebble with a certain  velocity striking a large boulder at rest would, under idealized  conditions, continue to move with the boulder with the same velocity  that it had initially. 