  From this passage and surrounding texts, we can glean three central  ideas Leibniz associates with the notion of dead force. First, just  as we might think of vis viva as a measure of the force a  moving body has in virtue of its being in motion, so we might think  of vis mortua as a measure of the force a body has to bring  about motion even while at rest, or at an instant. Second, living  force is related to dead force by an infinite summation; vis  viva is, as it were, an infinite accumulation of individual  instances of vis   mortua.[20]  Third, dead force is thus more immediately related to the study of  statics than to the study of dynamics, and Leibniz repeatedly  suggests that Cartesians have indeed been misled into maintaining the conservation of quantity of motion by confusing the laws of statics  with the laws of dynamics.