 The Stoics’ motivation for their bifurcation of “nature” was clearly to explain the  intentionality  of our thought and discourse, our apparent ability to think and talk as coherently about the creatures of mythology and fiction as about ordinary physical existents. Later variations broadened the Stoics’ realm of incorporeal intentional objects to include possibilia. In the early medieval period, the Islamic Mutazilite theologians distinguished between thing (shayʹ) and existent (mawjūd)) to comport with two passages of the Quʹran (16:40, 36:82) suggesting that God commands non-existent things into existence (Wisnovski 2003: 147). Avicenna (1926: 54-56) under the influence of the Mutazilates, was more explicit still that these non-existent things are possibilia: