86 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
and falling, the relation of an actor to his action—or, if yon 
so prefer, established substance-attribute relation between itself 
and down-ness. 
Analogously cerebrating, I imagine water in the one case 
as performing on the sponge the act of wetting, though if I 
reflect a moment, I am well enough aware that water of itself 
is impotent. Yet the force of habit is so strong that, if I be 
not roused to more than usual care, I think of wetting some¬ 
what as the water’s entering, and indeed more specially its 
rising up into, the sponge—a rising not so very different from 
a school-boy’s climbing up into a tree. I feel, however, nowise 
so far pledged to this conception as to be at all embarrassed in 
adopting on occasion one absurdly opposite; for by “The sponge 
absorbed the water” I am sure I mean that, in its turn en¬ 
dowed with active powers, the sponge “drew in” or, as the 
etymologist might tell us, “sucked away” or, as plebeian par¬ 
lance puts it, “drank” the water “up”—conceptions, all, in 
which I am about as near to fact as if I said the tree reached 
down and pulled the school-boy up into it. 
The illustration emphasizes what the careful thinker often 
overlooks: that words are the immediate symbols not by any 
means of things (activities, etc.), but of ideas, which only 
more or less exactly are the mental counterparts of things; that 
sentences are symbols not by any means of facts, but of our 
thoughts, which only more or less exactly are the mental count¬ 
erparts of facts; that not even is the this day’s counterpart 
consistent always with the counterpart of yesterday—the self 
of now with the self of then. Thus, in the now considered 
case, the action ranks in one expression as the water’s push, 
and in the other as the sponge’s pull. 
I am not however looking for linguistic trouble, having 
learned to be content with crude expression, and with cruder 
thinking and observing. It’s 4 enough for me to notice that at 
first the water wasn’t in the sponge, and that at last it was— 
enough to reason that it somehow got there—enough to tell 
you that it did so. Any successful method satisfies me. “On 
parle toujours bien, quand on se fait entendre.” 
