unexplained reason. Leibnitz was not prepared to accept any delay and he went immediately to the University of Altdorf where he received a doctorate in law in February 1667 for his dissertation De Casibus Perplexis (On Perplexing Cases). Leibnitz declined the promise of a chair at Altdorf because he had very different things in view. He served as secretary to the Nuremberg alchemical society for a while, after which he met Baron Johann Christian von Boineburg. By November 1667 Leibnitz was living in Frankfurt, employed by Boineburg. During the next few years Leibnitz undertook a variety of different projects, scientific, literary and political. He also continued his law career taking up residence at the courts of Mainz before 1670. One of his tasks there, undertaken for the Elector of Mainz, was to improve the Roman civil law code for Mainz but Leibnitz was also occupied by turns as Boineburg's secretary, assistant, librarian, lawyer and advisor, while at the same time a personal friend of the Baron and his family. Boineburg was a Catholic while Leibnitz was a Lutheran but Leibnitz had as one of his lifelong aims the reunification of the Christian Churches and with Boineburg's encouragement, he drafted a number of monographs on religious topics, mostly to do with points at issue between the churches.Another of Leibnitz's lifelong aims was to collate all human knowledge. Certainly he saw his work on Roman civil law as part of this scheme and as another part of this scheme, Leibnitz tried to bring the work of the learned societies together to coordinate research. Leibnitz began to study motion, and although he had in mind the problem of explaining the results of Wren and Huygens on elastic collisions, he began with abstract ideas of motion. In 1671 he published Hypothesis Physica Nova (New Physical Hypothesis). In this work he claimed, as had Kepler, that movement depends on the action of a spirit. He communicated with Oldenburg, the secr...
