 The traditional rationale of Locke’s doctrine of ‘substance in general’ is as follows. Properties—or, in Locke’s terms qualities—must belong to something—‘cannot subsist…without something to support them’. Of course, they belong to objects, but what are objects over and above their properties? The special category of substantial form, as found in Aristotle, is rejected. All that seems to be left is a bare ‘something’, which on pain of regress, has no properties in its own right, except the property of being the owner or support of other properties.