 It may be tempting to say that for Leibniz we know that God does act on created substances continually, but we cannot understand how he does this. Consider what Leibniz writes in the New Essays: “[A]ll monads were created by God and depend on him; yet we cannot understand in detail how this was done; and fundamentally the preservation of monads is nothing but a continual creation, as the Scholastics knew very well” (New Essays A vi, 6, 443). Perhaps Leibniz simply adopts the Cartesian stance—that God is a sui generis cause, the likes of which we would be rash to think we can learn anything meaningful.