The answer is that the processes which surround the nucleus carry the meaning. _Psychologically regarded, meaning is always context_; and the context is the fringe of related processes that gathers about the central group of sensations or images. Ordinarily, as our analysis has shown, the two come together; but they may be disjoined. When the word ‘house’ becomes meaningless with repetition (p. 26), it is because the bare sound grows more and more vivid and dominant; like the nestling cuckoo, it drives out its normal associates; and these associates, the carriers of its meaning, sink lower and lower into the obscurity of the background. So the meaning, almost literally, drops off, falls away. When one and the same experience has different meanings, it is because the context varies; we read, for instance, that so-and-so received a warm welcome, and we put directly opposite interpretations on the words, according as so-and-so was friend or enemy. When we mistake a meaning, it is because we supply a context of our own: what child, reading that “the quality of mercy is not strain’d,” has not thought of mercy being wrung out through a strainer, as the cook wrings the water out of cottage-cheese in a muslin bag? The context of images is obvious; the rain falls freely, like water poured through a sieve; but what is _strained_ comes out grudgingly in drops. When one and the same meaning attaches to several experiences, it is because these different experiences are received into the same context, or into a context so nearly the same that for practical purposes the differences disappear; for example, the experiences may be named, that is, may be received into a context of verbal ideas; and verbal ideas tend to become stereotyped, as it were, into permanent groups. All the facts of § 6 are to be accounted for in this way, by the distinction of nucleus and context.