 How can distinct things have one thing in common? This is the problem of ‘the One over Many’ (cf. Rodriguez-Pereyra 2000). Universals provide a straightforward solution to this problem: Distinct things can have one thing in common, because there is one thing—the universal—which characterizes each of them individually. The trope theorist—at least if she does not accept the existence of universals in addition to  tropes[24]—does  not have recourse to entities that can be likewise identical in distinct instances, and must therefore come up with a slightly more complicated solution to this problem. She must ‘build’ something able to do the same problem-solving work the universal does, using only tropes.