Words are the great instrument of translating a relation of inference existing between two things into a new kind of thing which can be operated with on its own account; the term of discourse or reflection is the solution of the requirement for greater flexibility and liberation. Let me repeat: Crusoe's inquiry can play freely around and about the man inferred from the footprint only as he can, so to say, get away from the immediate suggestive force of the footprint. As it originally stands, the man suggested is on the same coercive level as the suggestive footprint. They are related, tied together. But a gesture, a sound, may be used as a _substitute_ for the thing inferred. It exists independently of the footprint and may therefore be thought about and ideally experimented with irrespective of the footprint. It at once preserves the meaning-force of the situation and detaches it from the immediacy of the situation. It is a meaning, an idea. Here we have, I submit, the explanation of notions, forms, essences, terms, subsistences, ideas, meanings, etc. They are surrogates of the objects of inference of such a character that they may be elaborated and manipulated exactly as primary things may be, so far as inference is concerned. They can be brought into relation with one another, quite irrespective of the things which originally suggested them. Without such free play reflective inquiry is mockery, and control of inference an impossibility. When a speck of light suggests to the astronomer a comet, he would have nothing to do but either to accept the inferred object as a real one, or to reject it as a mere fancy unless he could treat "comet" for the time being not as a thing at all, but as a meaning, a conception; a meaning having, moreover, by connection with other meanings, implications--meanings consequent from it. Unless a meaning is an inferred object, detached and fixed as a term capable of independent development, what sort of a ghostly Being is it? Except on the basis stated, what is the transition from the function of meaning to _a_ meaning as an entity in reasoning? And, once more, unless there is such a transition, is reasoning possible?