Feeling and emotion are different functions which are often confused with each other and with other interpersonal complexes such as sympathy and empathy. One idea is that a feeling is like the sound of a single musical note while an emotion is like a melody or a motif. This means that an emotion is always constituted by more than one feeling, and is something like a pattern of feelings. Feelings by themselves may be more or less finely discriminated but do not reach beyond themselves, do not appear to mean or motivate anything. Emotions, on the other hand, are not self-contained, if only in that they seem to demand a continuation, resolution or repetition. While a feeling as a sort of essence may be timeless, emotions are definite events in the flow of subjective time, in the stream of consciousness, bringing about a change of context which affects any feeling or emotion that succeeds them. Emotions have an energy of dynamism in them, they mean without meaning anything definite, or more precisely they seem to wish to mean something, a wish that is generally only met by another emotion, which again seeks to fulfil its desire for meaning. A feeling can be drawn into an emotion, become an inseparable part of it, even its focal point and so come to bear the energy of that emotion. The word feeling is ambiguously subjective and objective, referring either to an inner bodily sensation or to a sort of outer perception of texture and context. All of these observations are more or less in line with the musical analogy, but the analogy has trouble with the sense that the correlate of feeling is value, - as when we say that something feels right or wrong. Similarly, although emotions seem to require an anchoring in feeling it is difficult if not impossible to analyse an emotion into its constituent feelings. The relation of emotions to concrete feelings may also be very tenuous as is the emotions alluded to in the phrase 'emotional thinking'. It is emotions that seem to be built up from a palette of primary instances, such as anger, joy and so on, and these basic emotions do not readily resolve into feelings although they do coincide with strong valuations. To be emotionally detached is to have little or no emotion, while to feel something in a detached way is to feel it more reliably.