 Consider these platitudes: there are things, and there are ways those things are (we might call the latter ‘properties’). There appear to be, for example, tall trees; there also appear to be properties had by those trees, such as being  tall.[5]  There appear to be, again, both things and properties. Perhaps there is, then, an important distinction between things and properties. And if there is such a distinction, it would appear to mark an important metaphysical divide. For it operates at a very high level of abstraction and promises to exhaustively and exclusively divide reality into categories—with trees, people, planets (for example) falling under thing and green, tall, itchy, and kind (for example) falling under property. The thesis that there is such a divide, we note, is distinct from purely semantic theses about whether to use the words ‘object’ and ‘property’ to pick out each side of that divide. Our focus here is on the metaphysical question of whether there is such a contrast in the first place, not on which words might express it.