 Primitive distinction must occur somewhere – so why not make it at the level of the substance itself, rather than of some constituent of the substance? Rejection of Scotus’s view was not confined to such manifest opponents of Scotus’s system. Amongst the earliest students of Scotus, various found his views on the haecceity and its formal distinction from the nature unpalatable. William of Alnwick, the foremost of Scotus’s students working through the second decade of the fourteenth century, holds at least two different positions, neither the same as Scotus’s. In an early disputed question on individuation, William holds that natures are individual of themselves (Stella [1968], 363); later, in his Ordinatio on the Sentences, William accepts something akin to Henry of Ghent’s position that individuation is by a negation, though adding the clarification that this negation represents nevertheless a perfection – it is better not to have the positive feature of divisibility (Stella [1968], 630–631). The reason for the shift in view is an apprehension that the fact that natures can be multiplied (i.e. exemplified many times) entails that a nature cannot be self-individuating (Stella [1968], 628). But William cannot see how the added feature could be anything positive, since he does not see how an individual could be anything, necessarily, other than its nature (Stella [1968], 631). In both works, William objects to Scotus’s view that the common nature is somehow prior to its instantiations, on the grounds that this priority entails that the common nature could exist without any of its instantiations (Stella [1968], 352, 625). This in effect amounts – in Scotist terms – to the claim that the nature is really distinct, not just formally distinct, from any of its instantiations. For Scotus, the mark of a formal distinction is inseparability: no individual is separable from its nature, and there is thus no more than a formal distinction in any individual between nature and haecceity. Ockham puts his finger on this misinterpretation on the part of Alnwick: