These varied conceptions of language’s workings invariably feed into ideas of how we interact with language, or how language interacts with us, as feeling, thinking, language-using and language-experiencing creatures. I’ve been taking for granted thinking and feeling as interwoven, emotional experience as something bound up with understanding. The position is held in remarks such as ‘intelligence, of which an important function is the discernment of exactly what, and how much, we feel in any given situation’ (T. S. Eliot), or in Maritain’s reference to ‘intelligence-permeated sense’. R. G. Collingwood says differently.