This mechanical philosophy was based on Epicureanism, and the work of Leucippus and his pupil Democritus and their atomism, in which everything in the universe, including a person's body, mind, soul and even thoughts, was made of atoms very small particles of moving matter. Various European philosophers adopted what came to be known as mechanical philosophy sometime between around 1610 to 1650, which described the universe and its contents as a kind of large-scale mechanism, a philosophy that explained the universe is made with matter and motion. In the early 17th century, natural philosophers began to develop new ways to understand nature gradually replacing Aristotelianism, which had been for centuries the dominant scientific theory, during the process known as the Scientific Revolution. It would fall out of the spotlight in the early nineteenth century, as the wave theory of light amassed new experimental evidence.

This theory came to dominate the conceptions of light in the eighteenth century, displacing the previously prominent vibration theories, where light was viewed as 'pressure' of the medium between the source and the receiver, first championed by René Descartes, and later in a more refined form by Christiaan Huygens. This early conception of the particle theory of light was an early forerunner to the modern understanding of the photon. Isaac Newton laid the foundations for this theory through his work in optics. This was based on an alternate description of atomism of the time period. In optics, the corpuscular theory of light states that light is made up of small discrete particles called ' corpuscles' (little particles) which travel in a straight line with a finite velocity and possess impetus.

A theory in physics relating to the nature of light

Particle model of light phenomena