The Paracelsan View of Matter

corpuscularianism was worming its way into philosophical debates well before the seventeenth century. But i should admit that, in fact, these two positions could share something in common. Each substance is a composite of matter and form, with matter providing the potentiality, and form the actual determination of that potential. This sounds a good deal like the stoic theory: nature implants rational things, or seeds, in matter as seeds. It's an idea that would have been known to renaissance readers thanks to cicero's presentations of stoic doctrine during the sixteenth century.