 Some such notion of attention also plays a central role in R.G. Collingwood’s account of the way in which art (and, in particular, literature) contributes positively to a society’s culture. Collingwood describes attention as “the assertion of ourselves as the owners of our feelings”, and takes this self-assertion to be crucial in enabling us to exercise volition over those feelings, so that “Their brute power over us is thus replaced by our power over them” (Collingwood, 1938, p. 222). Collingwood therefore takes the diminution of a society’s artistic culture to make it vulnerable to emotive influences (while himself suggesting that this might best read, not as a broad philosophical claim, but as a point about Europe in the nineteen thirties).