It is quite as true to say that a thing is called water because it suggests thirst-quenching as to say that it suggests thirst-quenching because it is characterized as water. _The knowledge function becomes prominent or dominant in the degree in which there is a conscious discrimination between the fact-relations and the meaning-relations._ And this inevitably means that the "water" ceases to be _surely_ water, just as it becomes doubtful or hypothetical whether this thing, whatever it is, really means thirst-quenching. If it really means thirst-quenching, it is water; so far as it may not mean it, it perhaps is not water. It is now just as much a question _what_ this _is_ as what it means. Whatever will resolve one question will resolve the other. In just the degree, then, in which an existence or thing gets intellectualized force or function, it becomes a fragmentary and dubious thing, to be circumscribed and described for the sake of operating as _sign_, or clue of a _future_ reality to be realized through action. Only as "reality" is reduced to a sign, and questions of its nature as sign are considered, does it get intellectual or cognitional status. The bearing of this upon the question of practical character of the distinctions of fact and idea is obvious. No one, I take it, would deny that action of some sort _does_ follow upon judgment; no one would deny that this action _does_ somehow serve to test the value of the intellectual operations upon which it follows. But if this subsequent action is _merely_ subsequent, if the intellectual categories, operations, and distinctions are complete in themselves, without inherent reference to it, what guaranty is there that they pass into relevant action, and by what miracle does the action manage to test the worth of the idea? But if the intellectual identification and description of the thing are as tentative and instrumental as is the ascription of significance, then the exigencies of the active situation are operative in all the categories of the knowledge situation. Action is not a more or less accidental appendage or afterthought, but is undergoing development and giving direction in the entire knowledge function.