37. It may be said perhaps that Locke’s self-contradiction in this regard is more apparent than real; that the two processes of combining simple ideas are essentially different, just because in the later process they are combined by a conscious act of the mind as accidents of a ‘something,’ of which the _general_ idea has been previously formed, whereas in the earlier one they are merely presented together ‘by nature,’ and, _ex hypothesi_, though they gradually suggest, do not carry with them any reference to a ‘substratum.’ But upon this we must remark that the presentation of ideas ‘by nature’ or ‘by God,’ though a mode of speech of which Locke in his account of the origin of knowledge freely avails himself, means nothing else than their relation to a ‘substratum,’ if not ‘wherein they do subsist,’ yet ‘from which they do result.’ If then it is for consciousness that ideas are presented together by nature, they already carry with them that reference to a substratum which is supposed gradually to result from their concurrence. If it is not for consciousness that they are so presented, if they do not _severally_ carry with them a reference to ‘something,’ how is it they come to do so in the gross? If a single sensation of heat is not referred to a hot thing, why should it be so referred on the thousandth recurrence? Because perhaps, recurring constantly in the same relations, it compels the inference of permanent antecedents? But the ‘same relations’ mean relations to the same things, and the observation of these relations presupposes just that conception of _the thing_ which it is sought to account for, But it is explicitly to substance that Locke makes them refer themselves. 38. We are estopped, however, from any such explanation of Locke as would suggest these ulterior questions by his explicit statement that ‘all simple ideas, all sensible qualities, carry with them a supposition of a substratum to exist in, and of a substance wherein they inhere.’ The vindication of himself against the pathetic complaint of Stillingfleet, that he had ‘almost discarded substance out of the reasonable part of the world,’ in which this statement occurs, was certainly not needed. Already in the original text the simple ideas, of which the association suggests the idea of substance, are such as ‘the mind finds in exterior things or by reflection on its own operations.’ But to find them in an exterior thing is to find them in a substance, a ‘something it knows not what,’ regarded as outward, just as to find them by reflection on its own operations, as its own, is to find them in such a substance regarded as inward. The process then by which, according to Locke, the general idea of substance is arrived at, presupposes this idea just as much as the process, by which ideas of particular sorts of substances are got, presupposes it, and the distinction between the two processes, as he puts it, disappears.