 Thought is established by the intellect, but there are two, separable roles of thought called ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’. Its primary role is to ‘apprehend or construct relations’ (216) amongst ideas, as just described (in fact Collingwood thinks in such relations the relata are fused in a new idea comprising a ‘peculiar colouring or modification of the old’ (223)). The secondary role is to apprehend or construct ‘relations between acts of primary intellection’; by this Collingwood means conceptions of the past, future, the possible etc., and presumably all that content of human thought which can not be accounted for in terms of the imagination.