 Now one might be tempted to suppose that thoughts as grasped by the intellect are roughly the same as propositions, in the sense intended by analytical philosophers. But Collingwood holds that the proposition is ‘a fictitious entity’ (266), and devotes a long passage to excoriating that tendency in philosophy. Every actual episode of thought is performed with its own particular degree and character of emotion; there is no such thing as the thought shorn of its emotional husk. All mental activity has some emotional character, including intellectual activity. The cry of ‘Eureka’ said to have accompanied Archimedes’ discovery of a principle of hydrostatics is but an extreme example. Thus language is expressive of emotion even in its scientific use. This applies even to mathematical symbols and technical symbols. Insofar as they are used, they automatically acquire the expressive character of the underlying thoughts. Thus Collingwood says: ‘Symbolism is thus intellectual language; language, because it expresses emotions; intellectualized, because adapted to the expression of intellectual emotions’ (269). In ‘poeticizing’ such language, Collingwood does not intend to demean it; presumably the aim is to do justice to the rarefied air of pure intellect: