The rest of the experience is made up of emotions and attitudes. Emotions are what the reaction, with its reverberation in bodily changes, feels like. Attitudes are the impulses towards one kind of behaviour or another which are set ready by the response. They are, as it were, its outward going part.[2] Sometimes, as here in _Westminster Bridge_, they are very easily overlooked. But consider a simpler case--a fit of laughter which it is absolutely essential to conceal, in Church or during a solemn interview, for example. You contrive not to laugh; but there is no doubt about the activity of the impulses in their restricted form. The much more subtle and elaborate impulses which a poem excites are not different in principle. They do not show themselves as a rule, they do not come out into the open, largely because they are so complex. When they have adjusted themselves to one another and become organized into a coherent whole, the needs concerned may be satisfied. _In a fully developed man a state of readiness for action will take the place of action when the full appropriate situation for action is not present._ The essential peculiarity of poetry as of all the arts is that the full appropriate situation is _not_ present. It is an _actor_ we are seeing upon the stage, not Hamlet. So readiness for action takes the place of actual behaviour. This is the main plan then of the experience. Signs on the retina, taken up by sets of needs (remember how many other impressions all day long remain entirely _unnoticed_ because no interest responds to them); thence an elaborate agitation of impulses, one branch of which is _thoughts of_ what the words mean, the other an emotional response leading to the development of _attitudes_, preparations, that is, for actions which may or may not take place; the two branches being in intimate connection. We must look now a little more closely at these connections. It may seem odd that we do not more definitely make the thoughts the rulers and causes of the rest of the response. To do just this has been in fact the grand error of traditional psychology. Man prefers to stress the features which distinguish him from monkey, and chief among these are his intellectual capacities. Important though they are, he has given them a rank to which they are not entitled. Intellect is an adjunct to the interests, a means by which they adjust themselves more successfully. Man is not in any sense primarily an intelligence; he is a system of interests. Intelligence helps man but does not run him. Partly through this natural mistake, and partly because intellectual operations are so much easier to study, the whole traditional analysis of the working of the mind has been turned upside down. It is largely as a remedy from the difficulties which this mistake involves that poetry may have so much importance in the future. But let us look again more closely at the poetic experience.