  Bonaventure begins by distinguishing the consideration of matter from the actual existence of matter in the order of natural  history.[20]  We may consider matter simply as a constitutive principle of things and as such it is pure potency; this is the way that the concept of matter functions in Aristotle’s Physics and, to Bonaventure’s mind, how Augustine spoke of matter in the Confessions. But we may also think of matter as it actually exists in time. In this respect, matter never exists and cannot exist as lacking all form. Such a claim, however, does not require that material creation was brought forth as fully formed, even if such a position might be more philosophically defensible than its  opposite.[21]  Instead, Bonaventure suggests that physical matter was created in a state wherein it had a tendency and capacity to admit many different forms, though it had none of them in its own right. Rather, its potentiality to develop distinct forms required further external, divine agency in order for the distinct things having diverse forms to fully  emerge.[22]  Physical matter’s properties in its incomplete state included extension and visibility (properties arising from the form common to all physical things, namely, light). These features are still shared by all the items in the physical world, even though Bonaventure admits, in accord with the Aristotelian teaching on the heavens, that heavenly bodies, such as the stars, have matter that differs in kind from that of terrestrial things. Accordingly, after things were fully produced matter was twofold, terrestrial and celestial, but in its primordial state physical matter enjoyed a corresponding unity that was one of contiguity, i.e., it was one  mass.[23]  This primordial unity of physical matter continues to have some scientific bearing for Bonaventure since it grounds the consideration of the general physicist who may prescind from the process of generation and corruption and consider bodies simply in terms of their mobility in place and  extension.[24]