 Bentham seems to have thought of the meaning of a word in causal terms, as its capacity to act on a subject by raising an image of perceptible substances or emotions for which, he said, the word was a name. ‘By these general terms or names, things and persons, acts, and so forth are brought to view…’ (Bentham 1782, 82; see also Bentham 1776, 28, 108n). Words that do not bring to view such perceptible things have no meaning, on his theory, except insofar as they can be expounded by ‘paraphrasis’—Bentham’s method of translating whole sentences in which those words are used into sentences that do raise images of perceptible things.