Abstract: Locke wrote both scornfully and acceptingly about the thought of ‘substance’, understood as the substratum of all qualities. This is because he was trying to talk about the notion of a thing; he thought we could not do without the ‘thing’ thought, but that it could not satisfy his own theory about how a general word comes to have a meaning. The chapter shows how he could have avoided the second horn of this dilemma; it also discusses Ayers's rival interpretation of the texts on substratum.

Keywords: Ayers, Locke, meaning, substance, substratum, thing,