Inside the familiar-looking array of colored cells were substances called Pekingese, Asparagus, Clorox, Asinine, Antipathy, Tedium and Delirium.
Unless there were substances in this sense, no qualities could be real: the tallness of the tree would not exist unless the tree existed.
"The settlement agreement acknowledges that while there were substances in my barn that had no business being there, I did not know they were there, I did not know cobra venom had been placed in my barn.
For centuries, Aristotelian science had taught that the fundamental units of being were substances, in which qualities or "accidents" were lodged: thus, a cow is a substance, the redness of the cow an accident.
Furthermore, the things that earlier philosophers had assumed were substances are in fact "nothing but a collection of simple ideas, that are united by the imagination, and have a particular name assigned to them".
They are derivative existences, in the sense that the mathematician's mind in knowing them conceives of them as if they were substances, by looking at the physical world in an abstract way.
