 In this sense, the existence of natural things is due to a divine act of creation but the subsistence of these natural things does not require any continuous divine concurrence: “Things … have received substance from him, but they do not continue to receive it” (PT: 492). This is the crucial point that Taurellus’s rejection of prime matter is meant to make. Only if the subsistence of the forms that underlie the compositional structure of the world as well as their active and passive potencies does not depend on continued divine agency can the hypothesis that the world is an eternal accident of the divine substance be refuted.