(2) There was also increasingly from the thirteenth
century on a tendency towards more atomistic con-
ceptions of matter. Augustine was typical of the early
Middle Ages in maintaining its infinite divisibility: the
diffuseness of matter thus stood at the opposite extreme
from the total unity of God. Aquinas sharpened the
Aristotelian distinction between the potentially infinite
divisibility of the “intellectual matter” of mathe-
maticals and the determinate quantities required in
actual physical substances, including the elements
(Physicorum lect. ix. 9-10). William of Ockham's res-
ervation of “absolute existence” to substance and qual-
ity alone of the traditional ten categories meant that
the view of nature as a network involving connective
quantities, relations, and acts was yielding to a view
of localized centers of formed matter. But in addition
to this very general evolution of medieval thought from
enthusiastic system towards critical, and even icono-
clastic, analysis, there was specifically a doctrine of
elementary minima being elaborated during the Ren-
aissance within the Aristotelian tradition by such
natural philosophers as J. C. Scaliger and Daniel Sen-
nert, so that the adoption of atomistic theories in the
seventeenth century was not exclusively a matter of
revival.
