  Some medieval philosophers admitted the existence of minima naturalia, the limits beyond which form is not conserved. The doctrine of the minima was intended to resolve a problem raised by Aristotle in On Generation and Corruption (327a 30–328b 24), namely, that of the necessity of finding a philosophical justification for combination, an intermediate phenomenon between generation and corruption. Over the course of the Renaissance the doctrine of minima naturalia was further elaborated by authors like Agostino Nifo (circa 1469–circa 1539) and Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558). Scaliger granted a consistency to the minima, making them not mere limits, but real physical components which cannot be further divided. Furthermore, he rejected traditional atomism, because it did not achieved the continuity of the corpuscles which constitute a body. Despite their opposition to Peripateticism, the corpuscularism of Van Helmont and Daniel Sennert (1572–1637) was rooted in this tradition. Sennert, in particular, was unable to reject the Aristotelian concept of form, and aimed instead to establish a concord between Aristotelianism and atomism. Even in a work programmatically entitled Philosophia Naturalis adversus Aristotelem (1621), Sebastian Basson—who defended corpuscularism—denied the existence of the void and rejected a mechanization of the natural world. It was Galileo Galilei who made a bold departure from the qualitative background of Aristotelian matter, defending a mechanistic form of atomism in which atoms did not have dimensions. Despite the attempts of Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) to conciliate it with Christianity, atomism bothered traditionalists also for its theological implications, both large (the teleological vision of the world) and small (transubstantiation). Even Descartes came under attack for this reason. Debate over the existence of the void was also lively throughout the seventeenth century, largely because of the experimental work of Evangelista Torricelli (1608–1647), Valeriano Magni (1586–1661), Otto Von Guericke (1602–1686), and Robert Boyle (1627–1691), who opposed the traditional views of the so-called “plenists”.  