  From the perspective of kinematics, there is little new in Leibniz’s positive account of the laws of motion. As we have seen, Leibniz’s earliest systematic physics sought to accommodate the laws of impact as developed by Huygens and Wren by showing how those results might be derived from more fundamental laws of motion and the structure of the actual world. In his later work, that strategy is replaced by the attempt to show how essentially those same (“concrete”) laws of motion may be derived from a set of three conservation laws. Although Leibniz’s contribution to the kinematics of motion and impact was thus not revolutionary, he nonetheless had the good sense to champion the best accounts going, and made them his own through his elegant derivations and by relating them to the broader themes of his dynamics and metaphysics. 