It is important, certainly, to think of pictorial signs as endlessly supple and fluid. Even the rigidity of the meanings of words has been absurdly overstated. Poetry is only possible because the powers of evocation possessed by words are much less limited and defined than certain theorists would have us believe. But pictorial signs are more delicate agents than words. They vary in ways that words cannot. They are made _de novo_ on every occasion of their use, and therefore they can adapt themselves more adroitly to each new context. And every shade of variation in the constitution of the sign has its influence in determining the constitution of the mental presentation which it calls up. But even when we make all due allowance for the artist’s power of emphasis and discrimination with regard to the elements which make up the total thought-content of his object, we must confess that the range of expression centred round any single material object is limited. A study of such an object points to the object it was made from--it assures us that this particular object was bodily present to the eyes of the artist when he made the study, but it does not tell us in what ideal context we are to take the object. A study as such is not a work of art, or perhaps it would be better to say that it is a mere fragment of a possible work of art. A study is simply a pictorial name, and a name has meaning only in a sentence or by suggesting a sentence.[35] If we look at a study from the same point of view from which we regard a work of art, we should go on to ask ourselves, ‘Well, what of it, what is the artist’s purpose in painting or drawing this?’ It would start us upon an objectless and endless intellectual exercise, in which we should miss the purpose which every work of art implies. This indeterminateness and incompleteness of meaning forms, I believe, the essential characteristic of a study, as distinguished from a work of art. One result, then, of our insistence upon the content of pictorial art is the re-emergence of an old traditional usage or term which recent theorising has done its best to discard. Apart from the question of content, I believe there is nothing to distinguish a study or a sketch from a complete picture.