 Moreover, Descartes envisions the conservation of quantity of motion as one of the fundamental governing principles of the entire cosmos. When God created the universe, he reasons, a certain finite amount of motion (quantity of motion) was transmitted to its material occupants; a quantity, moreover, that God continuously preserves at each succeeding moment. (For more on the difficult issue of God’s continuous recreation or preservation of the material world, see, e.g., Gorham 2004, Hattab 2007, and Schmaltz 2008).