LANGUAGE AND LOGIC. Even where words are freed from irrelevant emotional associations, they are still far from being adequate instruments of thought. To be effectively representative, words must be clean-cut and definitive; they must stand for one object, quality, or idea. Words, if they are to be genuine instruments of communication, must convey the same intent or meaning to the listener as they do to the speaker. If the significance attached to words is so vague and pulpy that they mean different things to different men, they are no more useful in inquiry and communication than the shock of random noise or the vague stir and flutter of music. Words must have their boundaries fixed, they must be terms, fixed and stable meanings, or they will remain instruments of confusion rather than communication. Francis Bacon stated succinctly the dangers involved in the use of words: For men imagine that their reason governs words, whilst in fact words react upon the understanding; and this has rendered philosophy and the sciences sophistical and inactive. Words are generally formed in a popular sense, and define things by those broad lines which are most obvious to the vulgar mind; but when a more acute understanding or more diligent observation is anxious to vary these lines, and adapt them more accurately to nature, words oppose it. Hence the great and solemn disputes of learned men terminate frequently in mere disputes about words and names, in regard to which it would be better to proceed more advisedly in the first instance, and to bring such disputes to a regular issue by definitions. Such definitions, however, cannot remedy the evil ... for they consist themselves of words, and these words produce others.... [Footnote 1: _Novum Organum_. bk. I, aphorism 59.] If, to take an extreme case, a speaker said the word "chair," and by "chair" his listener understood what we commonly mean by the word "table," communication would be impossible. There must be some common agreement in the words used. In the case of simple terms referring to concrete objects there are continual concrete reminders of the meaning of a word. We do not make mistakes as to the meaning of words such as chair, river, stone, stove, books, forks, knives, because we so continually meet and use them. We are continually checked up, and the meanings we attach to these cannot go far astray.