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1) In the Categories, Aristotle introduces the notion of primary substance, by which he means a

concrete, individual, persisting thing such as a tree, a rock, a house or a man. Aristotle calls such things primary substances in order to distinguish them from what he calls secondary substances, by which he understands the general kinds to which those things belong. Thus the kind man is the secondary substance to which the individual man Socrates belongs, and Socrates himself is a primary substance.

2) Aristotle implies that the existence of qualities depends on the existence of substances, but not vice

versa the dependency is one sided or asymmetrical. Thus qualities like whiteness and circularity only exist because there are individual substances that are white or circular the qualities cannot exist, as it were, free-floating and unattached. This ontological asymmetry is reflected in the grammatical fact that qualities are predicated of substances, but primary substances themselves are not predicated of anything.

3) In the Metaphysics, Aristotle further elaborates his doctrines concerning substance, by introducing

the distinction between matter and form. Loosely, matter is what a thing is made of and form is the way in which that matter is organized. Form as well as matter is required to make a single, unified thing. A question which inevitably arises here is this: is it the form, or the matter, or the whole unified thing that is ontologically most fundamental? If either form or matter is more fundamental than the unified thing, then the latter, although called by Aristotle a primary substance in the Categories, will not after all be a fundamental constituent of reality. And hence not really be deserving of the title (primary) substance.

4) A further important ingredient in Aristotles later writings on substance is his notion of essence. He

distinguishes between the accidental and the essential properties or qualities of things like men, rocks and trees. Although a primary substance can persist through some qualitative changes, it cannot persist through all: some changes are substantial changes. A property which a substance cannot loose without thereby ceasing to exist is an essential property of that substance and the sum total of a things essential properties constitutes its essence or nature.

5) The scholastic approach was to suppose that the explanation of why a thing behaves as it does why a stone falls or why opium sends one to sleep is to be found in an account of the things essence, or nature, or substantial form. But this only seems to tell us that a thing behaves in the way it does because it is a thing of a kind such that it behaves in that way. This is neither very enlightening nor very useful in enabling us to predict the behavior of things not already familiar to us. Instead of being fobbed off with the explanation that a stone falls because it is in its nature to see the earth, Galileo and Newton can tell us precise mathematical laws relating stones velocity to the distance it has fallen in a given time they provide predictions which could be stated in precise quantitative and measureable terms.

6) Aristotle had regarded the human mind or soul as being nothing but the form of the human body,

rather than as a separable thing in its own right. Plato had a very different conception of the soul, and one more congenial to Christian doctrine. The Cartesian conception of the soul is more akin to Platos that to Aristotles, and indeed Descartes treats it as an individual substance capable of existence separate from the body. Locke likewise seems to adopt this view. Thus both Descartes and Locke are dualists on the question of the relation between soul and body.

7) Locke uses the term mode to speak of the various particular qualities or properties that particular

substances possess properties of shape, colour, weight and the like. It would appear that for Locke there are just three sorts of substance: individual material atoms, individual finite spirits (including human soul), and God (an infinite spirit). The individual things such as trees and animals which we are apt to speak of as substances more accurately have the status of modes attributable to genuine or ultimate substances of the three sorts just mentioned. Thus in the case of trees, say, the ultimate substances in question will obviously be material atoms.
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8) For Locke, there are two notions of essence, one explanatory and the other classificatory. The

explanatory notion is the one he calls real essence: real essence explains the very being of anything, whereby it is, what it is. The classificatory notion of essence is called nominal essence: nominal essence classifies things into kinds. Locke believes that things are ranked under names into sorts or species, only as they agree to certain abstract ideas, to which we have annexed those names.