It is no longer a system of representations which has the power to pattern and recompose other representations; it designates in its roots the most constant of actions, states, and wishes; what it is trying to say, originally, is not so much what one sees as what one does or what one undergoes; and though it does eventually indicate things as though by pointing at them, it does so only in so far as they are the result, or the object, or the instrument of that action; nouns do not so much pattern the complex table of a representation as pattern and arrest and fix the process of an action.