call this reminder "knowing" (as the presentative realist usually does) is to confuse a psychological event with a logical achievement. It is from misconception of this act of reminding one's self of what is known, as a check in some actual inquiry, that arise most of the fallacies about simple acquaintance, mere apprehension, etc.--the fallacies which eliminate inquiry and inferring from knowledge. _c_) The art of inference gives rise to specific features characterizing the _inferred_ thing. The natural man reacts to the suggested thing as he would to something present. That is, he tends to accept it uncritically. The man called up by the footprint on the sand is just as real a man as the footprint is a real footprint. It is a _man_, not the idea of a man, which is indicated. What a thing means is another _thing_; it doesn't mean a meaning. The only difference is that the thing indicated is farther off, or more concealed, and hence (probably) more mysterious, more powerful and awesome, on that account. The man indicated to Crusoe by the footprints was like a man of menacing powers seen at a distance through a telescope. Things naturally inferred are accepted, in other words, by the natural man on altogether too realistic a basis for adequate control; they impose themselves too directly and irretrievably. There are no alternatives save either acceptance or rejection _in toto_. What is needed for control is some device by which they can be treated for just what they are, namely, _inferred_ objects which, however assured as objects of _prior_ experiences, are uncertain as to their existence in connection with the object from which present inference sets out. While more careful inspection of the given object--to see if it be really a footprint, how fresh, etc.--may do much for safe-guarding inference; and while forays into whatever else is known may help, there is still need for something else. We need some method of freely examining and handling the object in its status as an inferred object. This means some way of detaching it, as it were, from the particular act of inference in which it presents itself. Without some such detachment, Crusoe can never get into a free and effective relation with the man indicated by the footprint. He can only, so to speak, go on repeating, with continuously increasing fright, "There's a man about, there's a man about." The "man" needs to be treated, not as man, but as something having a merely inferred and hence potential status; as a meaning or thought, or "idea." There is a great difference between meaning and _a_ meaning. Meaning is simply a function of the situation: this thing means that thing: meaning is this relationship. A meaning is something quite different; it is not a function, but a specific entity, a peculiar thing, namely the man _as_ suggested.