  Although we have no records of Leibniz’s work from the years  immediately following his youthful adoption of mechanism, there is  abundant evidence that by the late 1660s, he had studied the  writings of a wide range of mechanistic  philosophers,[3]  committed himself to the “hypothesis of the moderns, which  conceives no incorporeal entities within bodies but assumes nothing  beyond magnitude, figure, and   motion,”[4]  and had begun to search for ways to improve the  mechanistic philosophy of his  predecessors.[5] 