tent consists wholly of images,
(b) when it consists wholly of words. The case of mixed images and words
has no special importance, and its omission will do no harm.

Let us take in illustration a case of memory. Suppose you are thinking
of some familiar room. You may call up an image of it, and in your image
the window may be to the left of the door. Without any intrusion of
words, you may believe in the correctness of your image. You then have a
belief, consisting wholly of images, which becomes, when put into words,
"the window is to the left of the door." You may yourself use these
words and proceed to believe them. You thus pass from an image-content
to the corresponding word-content. The content is different in the two
cases, but its objective reference is the same. This shows the relation
of image-beliefs to word-beliefs in a very simple case. In more
elaborate cases the relation becomes much less simple.

It may be said that even in this very simple case the objective
reference of the word-content is not quite the same as that of the
image-content, that images have a wealth of concrete features which are
lost when words are substituted, that the window in the image is not a
mere window in the abstract, but a window of a certain shape and size,
not merely to the left of the door, but a certain distance to the left,
and so on. In reply, it may be admitted at once that there is, as a
rule, a certain amount of truth in the objection. But two points may be
urged to minimize its force. First, images do not, as a rule, have that
wealth of concrete detail that would make it IMPOSSIBLE to express
them fully in words. They are vague and fragmentary: a finite number
of words, though perhaps a large number, would exhaust at least their
SIGNIFICANT features. For--and this is our second point--images enter
into the content of a belief through the fact that they are capable of
meaning, and their meaning does not, as a rule, have as much complexity
as they have: some of their characteristics are usually devoid of
meaning. Thus it may well be possible to extract in words all that
has meaning in an image-content; in that case the word-content and the
image-content will have exactly the same objective reference.

The content of a belief, when expressed in words, is the same thing (or
very nearly the same thing) as what in logic is called a "proposition."
A proposition is a series of words (or sometimes a single word)
expressing