The special sense in which Langer considered works of art to express feeling must also be clearly understood. Crying is often said to be an expression of sadness or grief, and laughter an expression of high spirits. If a work of art were expressive of feeling in this sense, Langer argued, it would be a symptomatic expression of the artist’s currently felt feelings—”a confessional [or] a frozen tantrum” (1957b, 26). But as Langer used the term in speaking of works of art, expression is to be taken in the sense of presentation, as when we say that a sentence presents or expresses an idea: