 Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) advocated a form of mathematical atomism in which the influence of both the Democritean atomists and the Aristotelian scholastics can be discerned. This emerges when one turns to the First Day of Galileo’s Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences (1638). Salviati, Galileo’s spokesman, maintains, contrary to Bradwardine and the Aristotelians, that continuous magnitude is made up of indivisibles, indeed an infinite number of them. Salviati/Galileo recognizes that this infinity of indivisibles will never be produced by successive subdivision, but claims to have a method for generating it all at once, thereby removing it from the realm of the potential into actual realization: this “method for separating and resolving the whole of infinity at a single stroke” (1638 [NE: 92–93; 1914: 48]) turns out simply to the act of bending a straight line into a circle. Here Galileo finds an ingenious “metaphysical” application of the idea of regarding the circle as an infinilateral polygon. When the straight line has been bent into a circle Galileo seems to take it that that the line has thereby been rendered into indivisible parts, that is, points. But if one considers that these parts are the sides of the infinilateral polygon, they are better characterized not as indivisible points, but rather as unbendable straight lines, each at once part of and tangent to the  circle.[15]  Galileo does not mention this possibility, but nevertheless it does not seem fanciful to detect the germ here of the idea of considering a curve as a an assemblage of infinitesimal “unbendable” straight  lines.[16]