Now the word is nothing in itself; it is not sound primarily, but thought. The word is but a sign, a negligible quantity in human intercourse--a counter in which the coins are ideas and emotions--merely legal tender, of no value save in exchange. What we really experience in the sound of a sentence, in the sight of a printed page, is a complex sequence of visual and other images, ideas, emotions, feelings, logical relations, swept along in the stream of consciousness, --differing, indeed, in certain ways from daily experience, but yet primarily of the web of life itself. The words in their nuances, march, tempo, melody add certain elements to this flood--hasten, retard, undulate, or calm it; but it is the THOUGHT, the understood experience, that is the stuff of literature. Words are first of all meanings, and meanings are to be understood and lived through. We can hardly even speak of the meaning of a word, but rather of what it is, directly, in the mental state that is called up by it. Every definition of a word is but a feeble and distant approximation of the unique flash of experience belonging to that word. It is not the sound sensation nor the visual image evoked by the word which counts, but the whole of the mental experience, to which the word is but an occasion and a cue. Therefore, since literature is the art of words, it is the stream of thought itself that we must consider as the material of literature. In short, literature is the dialect of life--as Stevenson said; it is by literature that the business of life is carried on. Some one, however, may here demur: visual signs, too, are the dialect of life. We understand by what we see, and we live by what we understand. The curve of a line, the crescendo of a note, serve also for wordless messages. Why are not, then, painting and music the vehicles of experience, and to be judged first as evocation of life, and only afterward as sight and hearing? This conceded, we are thrown back on that view of art as "the fixed quantity of imaginative thought supplemented by certain technical qualities,--of color in painting, of sound in music, of rhythmical words in poetry," from which is has been the one aim of the preceding arguments of this book to free us.