 If the concept of act is taken up quite faithfully from Aristotle, Paul’s concept of potency conflates the Aristotelian one with the Neoplatonic one. For this reason, the Aristotelian pre-eminence of act over potency is weakened in more than one aspect – as we have already seen. And finally, the pure potentiality of Aristotelian prime matter is read in terms of the theory of rationes seminales, and therefore as an innate disposition to receive any form. In Paul’s opinion, prime matter has in itself the “right” places to set every form, since it is like the coffer in which are contained in potency all the forms of the things that will be generated in nature. His theory combines the two Aristotelian notions of matter (that of matter as the ultimate substratum, common to all the materials of which things are made, and that of matter as a pure potentiality) with Augustine’s notion of rationes seminales, the “germinative” principles of natural species. According to Paul, with the exception of those forms directly created by God, such as celestial intelligences and human souls (see In Metaph., V, tr. 2, ch. 4, fol. 193ra), all substantial forms derive from some passive potency (defined as the capacity to undergo change) present in prime matter and really distinct from it. Such potencies are universal (so to speak), in the sense that the continuous generation of singular things to which they give rise is aimed at the maintenance in being of a specific nature. Every potency is capable of producing a form of a certain kind an infinite number of times. Hence, no natural form passes from absolute non-being to being, but from potency to act, since it has always had its own kind of existence (potentialiter et seminaliter) as a sort of disposition in prime matter. Such potencies (or dispositions) are perpetual, ingenerable, and incorruptible, coeternal with matter itself. As a consequence, according to Paul, the generation of natural forms is like a passage from an indefinite and potential being, typical of what is universal, to the full and actual existence of what is singular. In order to produce a complete thing (namely, a thing composed by matter and form) from matter, in addition to the raw material with its dispositions (or potencies), the intervention of natural agents, both singular and universal, is required. The potencies of matter, inasmuch as they order matter to the production of complete things different in species are, in a broad sense, “germinative” principles of the natural species. On the contrary, a ratio seminalis in the strictest sense of the term is that disposition, caused by an agent in a suitable material, which predisposes that material to receive a form of the same kind of the form proper to the agent itself – a disposition which is by nature capable of operating even without the natural agent. Thus the potencies of matter are like the primordial seeds of the species (that are to be produced) “sown” in the matter itself (SN, pars vi, ch. 6, fol. 96va)