Within early modern intellectual culture, the figure of the first man and the smallest, indivisible particle of the natural world had an important factor in common: they were both first principles. Both Adam and the atom were, in their separate ways, founders of all generation and corruption that succeeded them and, for many seventeenth-century theologians and philosophers, desirable end-objects of knowledge. John Milton was certainly aware of the status held by the figure of Adam in contemporary philosophy. His depiction of the prelapsarian man responds to widespread views of Adam as first philosopher: the first principle of mankind, capable in turn of perceiving the essence of other first principles, with an innate ability to understand the true nature of things. There are two explicit references to ‘atoms’ in Paradise Lost. The first, and most well-known, occurs at the point of Satan's flight through Chaos; the second arises during a conversation between the first man and the archangel Raphael. Milton's Adam combines blessed innocence with the role of the experimental philosopher, a winning combination, commonly aspired to by seventeenth-century philosophers who longed to restore the same direct acquaintance with the origins of things. Following Raphael's account of the creation, Adam – with awe and gratitude but also with doubt, possibly sparked by the stimulus of recent conversation – replies that the angel: