Thirdly, _an experience and its meaning may be disjoined in time_. We often ask, in conversation, to have a remark repeated; we have heard without understanding; but before the speaker has time to repeat, we ourselves begin to reply; the meaning has come, but comes after an appreciable interval. So we may have to wait a little while before we can recall the meaning of some foreign word that nevertheless, as we say, we know perfectly well. This disjunction is also found in pathological cases. A patient “with slight stupor could not answer questions except very slowly. She was constantly saying: ‘I see everything, but I don’t know anything.’ It took her five minutes to tell the time when she was shown a clock.” Here the experience comes first, and the meaning follows after. This order may, however, be reversed. You want to know the German of the proverb ‘Out of the frying pan into the fire’; you have the meaning, but you cannot think of the words; and presently the words leap to mind, _aus dem Regen in die Traufe_, out of the rain into the roof-drip. Or you know what you want to say, but you cannot get this meaning into words. An author who is very definitely aware of the meaning he wishes to convey to his reader may nevertheless have to write a paragraph ten or twenty times over before the sight and sound of his own words give back that meaning to himself. Or again, you may anticipate, in listening to a lecture, the meaning of what the lecturer is going to say, and yet you may be surprised at the words which he actually uses. Fourthly, _one and the same experience may have several meanings_. Any dictionary is a proof of that! A lecturer may demonstrate the fact to a class by drawing on the blackboard, line by line, the figure of some such thing as, for instance, a desk-telephone. As the drawing proceeds, the lines may mean a pump, or a student lamp, or an electric portable, or a railway semaphore, or a jack, or various other things. In this case, to be sure, a single meaning is given when the drawing is complete; but there are plenty of experiences—a bit of bad handwriting, a distant object, an obscure patch in a painting—that leave us permanently unable to decide among several meanings. How often do we worry over a chance remark: it seemed to mean this, but could it have meant that, or is it possible that it really meant the other?