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So one of the transformations from preModern to Modern is the move from a thing as 'materia prima with form' to a thing as a set of particles which are thought of as parcels of matter.
But there is a related transformation.
If the senses are all that we have to go on, and they only give us knowledge of properties, maybe we have no warrant to think that there is anything more to a thing than a set of properties! - ?
John Locke thought there's no point at all in positing the existence of 'something you know not what'!
So one confusion Locke wishes to identify and clear away is the notion that it is helpful to think of properties as needing a kind of 'substrate' to 'support' them.
A person who tries to operate with the concept of substance doesn't really have any firm idea of it at all, he says - 'only a supposition of he knows not what support of such qualities which are capable of producing simple ideas in us...' Locke, Essay, Book II Chapter XXIII Section 1.
Locke's picture is: you get a set of ideas of sense when you look at the tree and it is your mind that forms out of them the idea of the tree. The idea of the tree for Locke is a complex idea, made up of several simple component ideas.
How exactly do our minds construct the idea of a tree from the set of ideas of qualities we get when we 'look at a tree'?
Locke assumes that when we have sense experience relating to, say, a tree we get a set of simple ideas of sense.
The different ideas that make up the set on one occasion often seem to go together on other occasions.
We think mistakenly that the reason they go together is because they all flow from one and the same 'something'.
Locke's point seems to be: the idea of a particular substance is the idea of "whatever it is" which gives rise to the set of simple ideas of sense which we are noticing stick together or co-occur.
"... we come to have the ideas of particular sorts of substances, by collecting such combinations of simple ideas as are, by experience and observation of men's senses, taken notice of to exist together; and are therefore supposed to flow from the particular internal constitution, or unknown essence of that substance." Essay, Bk II Chapter XXIII, Section 3.
For Locke our idea of a 'substrate' for a thing's properties is an illusion generated by the constant co-occurrence of a set of ideas.
Reprise
So: what for Locke is the idea of a thing? He puts it in his idiom of how you acquire ideas. How then for Locke do I acquire my idea of a thing?
When I look at an object, through my senses I get a set of ideas, each corresponding to one of the object's qualities. E.g. the idea of brown, the idea of rectangularity, the idea of hardness. Such sets of qualities appear to recur repeatedly. I infer from this fact that the set of qualities "inhere" in "something".
Our idea of a 'something' which we think of a set of qualities as 'inhering in' is our idea of a 'particular substance'. It is really a confusion on our part.
For the Scholastics through perception you encountered directly whatever populated the universe. For the new framework, those 'things', insofar as there were any, were mysterious and shadowy, unplummable, and what perception was thought of as giving access to were qualities. If we wanted to make scientific progress we should concentrate on qualities and the relations between them (eg weights, or smells and shapes).
Is Locke broadly right that you get information of different modalities which your brain subsequently works up to form a complex data-structure which uses the concept of a thing?
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