While we do not claim that all cases of meaning involve such wide-spread and imperative bodily disturbances as those which occur in connection with tragic or erotic situations, it is nevertheless a valid inference that words which stimulate us to no activity whatsoever mean nothing to us. Certain it is, at least, that the more meaningful or significant any word is, the more does it stir up latent tendencies to action throughout our whole organism. Political and religious slogans are telling examples of this. “Great is Diana of the Ephesians!” “Remember the Maine!” and “For God, for Country, and for Yale!” have been for some persons phrases of the maximal philosophic content. Moreover, the same word may arouse different meanings (or action-patterns) in different people, depending not only on how the word is spoken, but also on the mood of the auditor. It is a matter of common observation that the shout of “Fire!” calls forth by no means the same responses from an insured landlord as it evokes from an uninsured tenant, while the mention of _water_ will stimulate one sort of reflex action in a thirsty man, and quite another sort in a man who has just been rescued from drowning. It is plain, then, that if physiological science has achieved the least light upon the problems of psychology, the meaning which any word or phrase possesses is not something that the sound of the word or its written symbol is endowed with, or something that filters through from any Platonic realm of ideas, but the meaning of any word is given to it by the person who speaks or hears it. Moreover, this endowment of meaning is implicit in the arousal of action tendencies at the time when the word is spoken or heard. In the example recently cited, the word “fire” had a different meaning for the insured landlord from what it had for the uninsured tenant because the habits of precaution which the former had acquired established a different motor attitude toward fire than did the procrastination of the latter. Consequently, the shouting and the conflagration were stimuli in the presence of which the landlord could be calm, while the tenant could not.