Of all the vexed questions which psychologists have had to answer, perhaps none is more difficult than the question as to the place of language in the mental economy. What is language for? How did it originate? What is its relation to thinking? To overt activity? It is at once apparent that the answers to these questions are highly important to ethics, since the words good and bad, right and wrong, and the like, play such a prominent rôle in our judgments upon our fellow-men. Neither does it seem possible to understand why we employ these pairs of antonyms until we know what the single terms of the pairs signify. And while it will require several of the following chapters to give a satisfactory answer to some of the above questions, it is readily agreed that our judgments of value are employed principally for two purposes:—(1) to sort out some of the objects of the environment, e. g., by calling these _good_ and those _bad_, etc., and (2) to indicate to other persons what kind of behavior is to be expected of us with regard to the objects thus designated. That is our common experience. If a man calls a shop a _good_ shop, his future behavior toward it can be predicted. If he calls his neighbor _vicious_ he can be expected not to leave his wheelbarrow or his lawn-mower out at night. Moreover, if we know what sort of things a man calls bad, virtuous, or right, his whole social philosophy can be plotted from the data provided by these particular judgments. To state it briefly, speech becomes an instrument for the transmission of _meanings_. Before we proceed further, let us see just what this involves in terms of bodily mechanisms. _A Mechanistic Interpretation of the Meaning of Words_ To the superficial observer of a man who declares that something is cheap, or beautiful, or good, the sight of his lips moving and the sound of the words as they are produced might appear to be the whole phenomenon. Nevertheless, if anyone were to look carefully behind the scenes of this performance, one would find a much more elaborate play being enacted than is apparent on the surface. Just as we know now from the findings of the physiologist that when the eye _sees_, far more structures than the retina are affected, and just as we are now certain that when the ear _hears_, many more organs than the ear-drum and cochlea take part in the response to the stimulus, so we are convinced that when the words we speak have a meaning, a neuro-muscular drama of a very elaborate character is being silently performed within our skin.