 It does not help much if we conceive of substances as particularized properties or tropes instead. For then it is unclear how we can individuate one spatial-extension-trope from another. We cannot differentiate them according to the individuals in which they inhere because we have just rejected the existence of individuals at the level of substances. We cannot say that this spatial-extension-trope is different from that because they turn up in different individuals, since the different individuals are just collections of tropes. Of course we could try to tell apart the various trope-substances by the collections in which they occur (or, more precisely, by which other tropes they are related to via a higher-order compresence-trope). The difficulty for this is that it introduces dependence-relations via the back door, for every trope will existentially depend on being connected to just these other tropes via a compresence-trope — we cannot take a trope and ‘move’ it to another collection. As we want to conceive of substances as entities that are not existentially dependent on one another this approach inevitably introduces a certain tension into our system. It thus becomes apparent that once more a conceptual scheme that can be more or less straightforwardly applied to non-substances breaks down once we attempt to analyse the supposedly foundational objects of our world in terms of it. While the analysis of a red apple into an individual and the property it instantiates is at least on the face of it unproblematic, the same analysis generates problems when applied to ultimate existents. (See, however, Siderits 2014, 2016: 113.)