Written in 1686 by the celebrated German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics is a short, early work in which Leibniz explains how the Earth, which was created by God (an undeniably perfect being), is therefore blessed with the same purity and perfection as its creator.

Leibniz was one of the most important philosophers of the Enlightenment era and was a contemporary of Isaac Newton. But today, Leibniz's best remembered for his work in developing differential and integral calculus. A renowned rationalist - ranked with Rene Descartes and Baruch Spinoza - Leibniz himself made extraordinary discoveries in the fields of - among others- philosophy, politics, theology, history, philology, law and politics.

A seeming autodidact, Leibniz authored tens of thousands of letters and manuscripts on such disparate topics as physics, biology, geology and computer science.