 Such difficulties attended the birth, in the fifth century BCE, of the school of atomism. The founders of this school, Leucippus and Democritus, claimed that matter, and, more generally, extension, is not infinitely divisible. Not only would the successive division of matter ultimately terminate in atoms, that is, in discrete particles incapable of being further divided, but matter had in actuality to be conceived as being compounded from such atoms. In attacking infinite divisibility the atomists were at the same time mounting a claim that the continuous is ultimately reducible to the discrete, whether it be at the physical, theoretical, or perceptual level.