_Originally, we must suppose, meaning was carried exclusively by kinæsthetic and organic sensations._ Think of the animal that we pictured on p. 101 as startled by some sudden stimulus and as facing the stimulus by way of a bodily attitude; the sensation is hemmed in, like a jewel in its setting, by the sensations of organic stir and motor posture; and these sensations give the meaning; they cry out ‘Danger!’; they are the psychological equivalent, the carriers, of that meaning; without them the sensation would be meaningless. _Meaning is thus older than the free image_; and kinæsthesis is still, for many of us, the characteristic context, the common denominator of our meanings; we hinted at this rôle on p. 47. None the less, the development of free images, the images of memory and imagination, changes the whole situation; kinæsthesis now has many rivals; and it depends on our individual equipment of images, on our ‘type of mind,’ whether a meaning shall be carried by a quiver of the stomach or some muscular set, or whether it shall be carried by some complex of images. If we were to work out a great number of cases, we should probably find that _any sensory or imaginal process whatsoever is able, in our adult human experience, to carry the meaning of any other_. There is yet a further stage: a stage in which _meaning is carried not by any sort of sensation or image, but simply and solely by physiological processes_, by some set or disposition of the brain. When the practised reader skims a number of pages in quick succession; when the musician renders a composition in the prescribed key; when an accomplished linguist shifts from one language to another as he turns to his right or left hand neighbour at a dinner table; in cases of this kind there need be no discoverable context; the stimuli press the button, and the brain, prepared by constant practice in the past, now does the rest. The experiences _mean_, positively enough; the ‘sense’ of the pages is grasped, as the eye hurries over the lines; the three flats on the staff set the player’s hand and eye for the key of E♭; the question put in French is suitably answered in the same language; everything takes place _as if_ there were a fringe of images that gave meaning to the bare perceptions; and yet imaginal fringe and kinæsthetic setting may be conspicuous only by their absence. Of course, there _has been_ context; one does not learn French and German, or transpose on the piano, by gift of a ready-made nervous system; even after years of work one may be a little uncertain of the German auxiliaries, or have a repugnance to four sharps. The point is, however, that an habitual and often-repeated context does, presently, lapse altogether; the nucleus is not always supplemented; the nervous system can now do, by a set or disposition that has no mental correlate, what it used to do by processes that had as accompaniment the sensations or images of the context.