Words as we see them _prima facie_ in a printed page do look separate entities. They stand, one here and another there, in a quasi-extension, with marks of direction and connexion pointing from one to another, but of connexion apparently extraneous to the more solid points which are represented by nouns and verbs, or names of substances, actions, and attributes. Results, as they are, of that practical analysis which the need of writing down language has led to, they are treated as complete wholes, which by the speaker are forced into certain temporary connexions. But this is an illusion which, because a thing changes its relationships, assumes that it can exist out of all relationships whatever. Every word of Language is such an abstraction, isolated from its context. But amid these contexts there are certain similarities: identical elements are detected: and these identical elements are the common names of language, the terms of general significance. In all cases, however, what an utterance of language describes or expresses is a definite individual event or scene, conceived as a concrete of several parts. Each separate vocable is a contribution to the total: a step towards the real redintegration of the whole out of its several parts. But the total itself--the content of fact in any single sentence--is only an abstraction,--a part of the universe which human interest and need have isolated from the comprehensive scope of things. Thus, in two degrees, we may say, the picture produced in the sentence falls short of the truth of things. Each statement is an arbitrary or accidental cutting out of the totality: each element of the cutting is dependent on that abstraction, and relative to it. But--as in a given group of speech, the same sets of circumstances will naturally be selected, and tend to recur again and again,--the terms which describe them will acquire a certain association with the objects, and will come to be called the common names of these agents, acts, and qualities. They denote or 'represent' the things and acts, conceived however in certain aspects and relations, and not in their entirety and totality of nature.