 Universal Matter was present in incorporeal as well as corporeal things. It was the genus of two types of matter, corporeal and intelligible. The former was the substrate of corporeal objects, as described above. The latter, Plotinus’s version of Plato’s Indefinite Dyad as reported by Aristotle, was instead the substrate—the principle of indeterminacy or potentiality—of intelligible realities. Bruno quoted two of Plotinus’s arguments for the existence of intelligible matter. First, the plurality of Ideas in the Intellect presupposed something common to each of them, this commonality being intelligible matter. Second, since the sensible world imitated the intelligible world and the sensible world comprised matter, so too must the intelligible. Plotinus, like other ancient Neoplatonists, considered the two matters ontologically distinct, as Bruno noted. Intelligible matter, as the matter of unchanging intelligible realities, did not change, Plotinus had explained. It “possessed” all things simultaneously. By contrast, the matter of sensible things possessed all things only inasmuch as parts of it assumed all possible forms sequentially. Bruno added a differentiation of his own, applying again Nicholas of Cusa’s distinction between explication and implication: intelligible matter was informed but unexplicated, sensible matter was informed but explicated. Nevertheless, Bruno insisted that corporeal and intelligible matter were, ultimately, two species of the genus Universal Matter. He was not the first to do so. The eleventh-century Jewish philosopher, Ibn Gabirol or, in Latinized form, Avicebron, as Bruno mentioned, had made the same move. Just as importantly, even if Bruno did not say so, so too had Ficino in accordance with Augustine’s Plotinian exegesis of Genesis 1:1–3. All distinctions, Bruno concluded, presupposed something indefinite: potentiality, matter. Hence the distinction between the two matters presupposed an absolute Universal Matter. No doubt he knew of Thomas Aquinas’s objections. Avicebron was wrong, Thomas had written, to say that species were the actualization of a genus’s potentialities and so attribute existence to what was a purely theoretical relationship between genus and species.