 In his De Ipsa Natura, Leibniz presents Sturm as a supporter of Malebranche’s occasionalism. This charge is partially correct insofar as Sturm does claim, like Malebranche, that God is the only active cause operating in nature. However, Leibniz oversimplifies Sturm’s position. Sturm’s account of passive forms is in fact different from Malebranche’s occasionalism for the role that it attributes to finite forms in the explanation of natural phenomena and for the relatively minor role that the notion of the laws of nature plays in Sturm’s account (see  sect. 3).