Now, such a general doctrine as this is manifestly open to grave objections. (1) If we are serious in maintaining the unknowable character of the substratum of a thing’s qualities, it is hard to see how the assertion of its existence can be any addition to our knowledge of the thing. To say that we are entirely ignorant of the nature of this substratum only amounts to saying in other words, that we have really no idea how the many qualities can be qualities of a single thing. If this is so, it does not appear what we gain by talking of the single thing at all as the owner or possessor of its qualities. It would, we might think, be better to abandon the confessedly unintelligible notion of a single substratum in which the qualities “inhere,” and say that the thing, for our intellect, is simply the many qualities themselves. How this view would have to be reconciled with the tacit assumption of the thing’s unity as a substance, which underlies all the judgments in which its attributes are predicated of it, we shall have to discuss more fully in the next section. (2) A still more serious difficulty remains behind. Not only is an “unknowable substratum of qualities” a superfluous luxury in metaphysical theory, but the nature of the supposed relation between such a substratum and the attributes which “flow” from it is unintelligible. We can understand neither what a substance or substratum totally devoid of qualities could possibly be, nor yet how the various qualities of the world of things presented to our experience could “flow” as secondary consequences from one or more such substrata. We cannot conceive how things could first “be” without this being of theirs possessing any definite character, and then subsequently, in virtue of their relations among themselves, give rise to their qualities or characteristic modes of being. Nothing can be at all without being in some determinate way, and this “being in some determinate way” is precisely what we mean by the qualities of a thing. A thing cannot be without behaving in special ways towards its environment, and these special ways of behaving are the thing’s qualities. We cannot, therefore, divorce the being or _that_ of a thing from its determinate mode of being or _what_, and regard the latter as something which supervenes on or is derived from the former, or the former as something which can exist without and apart from the latter. Things are not first there and afterwards in some mysterious way clothed with qualities; their qualities are simply their special way of being there. As Lotze well puts it, all such attempts to formulate a theory of the way in which the _what_ of things flows from a mere _that_, are attempts to answer the absurd question how Being is made.[80] The notion that things have a _that_ or substance prior to their _what_ or quality, and consisting simply in “being” which is not this or that determinate mode of being, is thus unmeaning as well as superfluous.