ABSTRACT
What exactly was he claiming? At least, that we call gold, iron, horses, body, spirit, and so forth things (the term in ordinary language generally taken to be the equivalent of the philosophical term 'substances') just because we suppose them to have an unknown nature. Their names fall into the category of substance, and are noun-predicates rather than adjectives, just because our ideas corresponding to those names contain an 'obscure' element, the general idea of a thing. The noun-predicate, Locke thought, is unpacked by means of the suitably indefinite term 'thing' (in effect 'something') plus a relative clause. The same explanation is given of the traditional distinction between a substance, such as a loadstone or body in general, and the accidents said to exist 'in' the substance. Such a way of speaking intimates that we conceive of the loadstone or body as something more than those observable attributes by which we know it.
