ABSTRACT
The implications of the conception of the macroscopic body as a composite, Daniel Sennert came in his later work to the firm view that the constituents are indivisible, calling them atoma corpuscula and corpora indivisibilia, and countered Aristotle's objections to atomism by maintaining that Aristotle had mistakenly ascribed the characteristics of the mathematical continuum to the actual physical existents. This is indeed the conception of the continuum entailed by the atomic theory. Aristotle had insisted that it is inconsistent with geometrical theory. This was the argument which confronted those thinkers of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who had become convinced, contrary to the Aristotelian doctrine, that macroscopic bodies are not homogeneous unitary substances but composites. It was in this respect that the thinkers were faced with Aristotle's argument against the possibility of minimal bodies, the argument which throughout the Middle Ages had effectively countered any inclination to the acceptance of atomism.
