 Boyle was a corpuscularian, a term he employed to paper over the differences between believers in a vacuum, and believers in a plenum, given that both of them agreed that the explanation of natural occurrences should be solely in terms of particles of matter, their motion and interaction. Boyle consistently refused to pronounce on the question of whether these minima naturalia should be considered atoms, in the strict sense of that term, or  not.[3]