The narrative illustrates some central principles which will help to orient us throughout the present study. Firstly, the facts or things that are displayed - the jam puff in this instance - are not merely incidental to what goes on between us. There is always something like a jam puff - some discriminable thing that we are concerned about in the here and now. But we miss the point of this, in the case of the jam puff, if we insist on merely seeing it as a sugary, flaky, jammy thing. It is a confection, an artefact socially conceived and inscribed within our common world of human desire and good or bad behaviour. Naturally, it can bear very directly upon the meaning of who we are for one another.

In a similar way the movements of our face, hands or arms - observable facts that can be recorded by a camera or a reliable witness - are simultaneously the contraction of muscles and also gestures which transmit our intimate meanings. Thus I may react in a concerned way, to the look you just gave me. Why did you look at me like that? You might say you meant nothing in particular - but I felt it as a hard, challenging look and I want to know what's going on.

Feelings are so basic to us, they are such a primitive layer of our experience, that it is really hard to pin down what they actually are, in contrast to what a feeling is about - which is usually easier. Feelings are about what is going on - and expressed in terms of my felt relationship with what is going on. I feel hungry, I feel delighted to have a jam puff to share, and delighted to be sharing it with you. At the same time, being the person that I am, I want this to be fair shares, and I want you to recognize me as being fair. All of this is feeling.

Emotion, passion and affection, words closely synonymous with feeling, seem to carry the message that this is something that happens to us, rather than something we do. This implies that we cannot help what we feel - we can acknowledge it or we can deny it, we can choose what we do about the feeling, but we cannot choose what to feel.

At every moment in my life I have a welter of human concerns, multiple and intricately interweaving. These concerns are written in my being as feelings. I know what I am concerned about, because I feel it. And so our starting definition of feeling might be that it is our primary sense of relationship - the relationship we are making with whatever or whoever it is we are concerned with. We can also think of feeling as an entire system of language, a layer which runs beneath that of spoken language. It is, in effect the language of relationship and it is, as we know, modulated through time over its characteristic range of qualities: happy, sad, bitter, angry, tender and so on.

We say: I feel it in my bones, I feel it in my heart, I feel it in my guts. In other words, we often register this feeling-sense in our body. This is actually a kind of knowing and - like any other kind of knowing - it can be wrong, or it can be mistaken.

"I'm not going to stand for this! I really feel you're taking advantage of me!"
"No you don't! You don't really feel that at all!"

What is this second person saying? Perhaps they mean that I am lying about my feeling. Well, this is certainly within the realms of human possibility. People can and do lie, about exactly this sort of thing. Usually it is part of a larger plot, in other words the person is dissembling about a whole line of self-presentation. In this case, when I made a show of anger - and complained about being taken advantage of - I would be making just one move in the game.

In the twentieth century this whole realm of dis-information was revolutionised by the work of Sigmund Freud. He depicted our conscious self as a puppet of powerful unconscious forces - and this amounts to a radical de-centring of our sense of ourself. It gives rise to a widespread sensibility in our own time that our best attempt at self-testimony may be seriously unreliable. Freud and his followers offer us a standing invitation to suspect that we may be lying to ourselves, or perhaps mistaken or ignorant about our own motives.

George Eliot was writing in a more innocent era, and was not about to be entangled in these particular toils. In her account of the brother and sister, the nature of Tom's underlying difficulty is unmistakable. It is that he has mixed motives. This means that he has at least two sets of motivating concerns; he is, in other words, experiencing a swirling cross-current of feelings.

Tom happens to be "tuned in" to the issue of fairness. But he is also motivated by envy that Maggie still has some jam puff left, that she is still enjoying it, perhaps even that he is getting no attention from her. Out of the cross-current, and his lack of self-awareness in the moment, comes his own extraordinary act of unfairness. Tom is going to repeat this in a variety of contexts throughout his lifetime, and he will not come anywhere near to an understanding of what, how or why Maggie suffers in consequence.

Within the context of Eliot's novel, the passage - with all its pain and pathos - comes across as a gently humorous interlude. For us here, though, it is a valuable pointer to that intricate web of feeling that enfolds and connects us all. This web is constantly in motion, constantly folding upon itself; and it often generates just the kind of double-takes and strange hiatuses which Eliot has displayed for us so deftly in her work. It is a sobering thought too, to realize that a narrative like this was created fifty years before Sigmund Freud and one hundred and twenty years before the brain and psychology research which have recently given birth to the concept of "emotional intelligence". It seems to me that there is a whole set of sensibilities and intelligences which George Eliot takes for granted, and which our culture seems largely to have forgotten by the early twentieth century.

There is a tendency in a great deal of modern scientific writing - not just on this particular topic - to imply that nobody knew anything about "their field" until it was "discovered" by science. It is as if we did not really know we had feelings at all, until a neurologist was able to point to a location in the brain, and declare it to be the place which makes feelings happen. On the contrary it should be obvious enough, that people have been feeling ever since there were people to feel on this planet. It is clear from even a brief look at the Holy Bible, and from the outpourings of ancient science, philosophy, literature and psychology, that our long-distant forbears were as aware as we are of the life of feeling, and considered the subject in much depth and with great subtlety.

Interestingly, the ancient Greeks had a word which corresponds remarkably closely to our modern concept of "emotional intelligence". The Greek word is "sophrosyne", which never translated into English very well. From our point of view, the concept corresponds to a cocktail of ingredients such as respect, compassion, tact, even-handedness and self-possession. The fifth century Athenians were fascinated by this concept, and one of Plato's dialogues is devoted entirely to an exploration of its deeper implications. It is interesting how we, in standard versions of the English language, seem to have carefully carved up our virtues into separate fragments. This makes it hard for us even to think the concept of sophrosyne.

It is worth noting that the street cultures which have informed our mass media through the last few decades all have terms corresponding closely to "emotional intelligence" - as if it is a concept badly needed in modern times. (Terms like "hip", "sus", "street-smarts" and "safe" come to mind.)

But we must return from our detours, from the nineteenth century novel, from fifth century Athens and twentieth century street culture, to consider what we know about feeling for ourselves. None of this talk about other people's feelings, and their understanding of what feeling is, could mean anything to us if we did not have direct experience of our own feeling states, to measure it by. Nor could we even comprehend what the scientific research into patterns and mechanisms of feeling was talking about. Our study of emotional intelligence has to begin at home, with our own feelings. We have to turn to our own unique experience, that inward immediacy, of what it is to feel.

Something begins for us at the moment of our birth. At first, perhaps, we are not able to feel "mother" and "the world" as separate beings. We quiver in awe at the enormity of it all. We open our hearts to its warmth and welcoming nurture. We shrink from its unimaginable danger. We rage at its seeming indifference to our needs. Later on, no doubt, things will become more complicated...

Speaking for myself, I lost that vivid sense of felt relationship rather early in my infancy. I recall a childhood strangely barren of emotion. I sensed that my mother, father, brother and sister were somehow embarrassed in the presence of strong feelings - I felt this as an unspoken demand to feel less, and I responded accordingly. All of us in the family lived as if ignorant of the real range and depth of human feeling. Of course I did not imagine that there was anything abnormal or unusual about this.

I used to have childhood nightmares about a world obscurely and terrifyingly crazy. As I grew up the evidence faded from view, yet I carried within me a nameless terror of being alive.

I do not believe that my mother and father were exactly lacking in feeling. They were both kindly people; in their own way they loved all of their children and were devoted to our welfare. But I cannot say that I really knew them, nor did I feel truly known by them. For a long time I imagined that both my parents must live in a similar "deadness" to the visceral sensations of emotion, which I remember within myself throughout the years from my mid-twenties backward to my infancy.

Obscure hungers, excitements and angers started to loom in my world as I entered into an adolescence laden with rock 'n' roll, emotional fog and awkwardness. The emerging feelings did not speed my heart or take my breath away, but they were enough to mark a change from that strange earlier blankness. And I can see now that they were forewarnings of the major changes which turned my life upside down at the age of twenty-five. This began quite suddenly one night when for the first time a fully felt sexuality flooded into my body. It could have been completely shocking, but my body insisted that it was honest and right. Also it spoke very clearly indeed to the confused yearnings of my prolonged adolescence.

There followed within the space of a few weeks an emergence of the live physical sensations of fear, and of emotional hunger, tenderness, anger and embarrassment - all palpable in a way that I have no recollection of ever feeling before that time. Here is where my problems really began, just because the new feelings carried highly disruptive implications for the regular pattern my life had established by that time. I was catapulted into a series of changes which demanded a complete re-evaluation of everything I had taken for granted in life.

This autobiographical reminiscence is not irrelevant but relates directly to the writing of this book. I believe I have an uncommonly rich experience of the gulf, the shocking discontinuity, that can open up between feeling and common sense. My process of re-evaluation - which continues to this day - seems to be forced upon me by the fact that my feelings repeatedly come into conflict with the demands of the common social reality. Both the feelings and the common sense are thrown into sharp relief, by the very fact that they seem to contradict each other.

For various reasons I have decided not to regard myself as a damaged specimen of humanity. I do differ from many, though, in this recurring need to become conscious of my feelings - and to reflect upon what they actually mean - just because they still keep on getting me into trouble. The positive side of this, I believe, is that it has opened the door for an unusual personal insight into the relationship between fact and feeling.

When I began to explore the incident of Maggie and Tom and the division of the jam-puff, earlier in this chapter, I made a broad distinction between the "thing" we are concerned about, and the feelings we have - through which our concern is actually registered. I tentatively defined "feeling" as our primary sense of relationship. Later I referred to "an intricate web of feeling that enfolds and connects us all." This, for me, is a good approximation of the situation we are in, when we try to describe it within the limitations of the everyday language we have in common.

There is, however, a whole layer of subtlety which the feeling-words - such as anger, love, grief, desire - have a tendency to cover over. The web of feeling which I have referred to is something far more intricate and delicate than the language we use to pick outiii individual feelings and their particular aims. This web corresponds to a deeper level of experience - something like a foundational layer of perception running beneath the more definitely apprised facts and feelings. It is, essentially, a more primitive and more vague sense of the actual situation. I believe that this felt sense precedes and underlies all of our more vividly experienced perceptions and emotions.