But let us imagine an instance in which it does happen. Supposing I had a habit of accompanying every English sentence which I said aloud by a German sentence spoken to myself inwardly. If then, for some reason or other, you call the silent sentence the meaning of the one spoken aloud, the process of meaning accompanying the process of saying would be one which could itself be translated into outward signs. Or, before any sentence which we say aloud we say its meaning (whatever it may be) to ourselves in a kind of aside. An example at least similar to the case we want would be saying one thing and at the same time seeing a picture before our mind's eye which is the meaning and agrees or disagrees with what we say. Such cases and similar ones exist, but they are not at all what happens as a rule when we say something and mean it, or mean something else. There are of course real cases in which what we call meaning is a definite conscious process accompanying, preceding, or following the verbal expression and itself a verbal expression of some sort or translatable into one. A typical example of this is the “aside” on the stage.