ABSTRACT
The conception of the universe which was gaining increasing acceptance in the seventeenth century as fundamental to the new science was that of the universe as a mathematical structure. Bruno had interpreted this as involving the identification of the physical and the mathematical. The physical continuum is actual, that is, it is the continuous magnitude of an actual physical body. In Aristotle's analysis of the continuum the distinction between actuality and potentiality plays a fundamental role. This distinction is equally fundamental for him in respect of the contrast of the physical and the mathematical. The development of the atomistic theory in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, arose out an identification of the new concept of matter with the ultimate constituents of bodies which are composites. Galileo's theory, by its reduction of the physical to the mathematical, constituted a radical departure from this conception of corporeal atomism.
