In the early modern period, Aristotelian hylomorphism fell out of favor with the rise of the "mechanical philosophy" of thinkers like Descartes and John Locke, who were more sympathetic to the ancient Greek atomism of Democritus than to the natural minima of Aristotle. However, the concept of minima naturalia continued to shape philosophical thinking even among these mechanistic philosophers in the transitional centuries between the Aristotelianism of the medieval Scholastics and the worked-out atomic theory of modern scientists like Dalton.
The mechanist Pierre Gassendi discussed minima naturalia in the course of expounding his opposition to Scholastic Aristotelianism, and his own attempted reconciliation between the atomism of Epicurus and the Catholic faith. Aristotles mininima naturalia became "corpuscles" in the alchemical works of Geber and Daniel Sennert, who in turn influenced the corpuscularian alchemist Robert Boyle, one of the founders of modern chemistry. Boyle occasionally referred to his postulated corpuscles as minima naturalia'.