Lukács no longer derives his aesthetic commitments at this point from purely philosophical premises—as he did in his Heidelberg writings—but rather builds on anthropological premises (especially concerning the concept of everyday life, in regard to which he notes the similarity between his analysis and Heidegger’s notion of practical engagement, see GW 11: 68–71, for related points on the Ontology see Joós 1982), psychological theorizing (proposing an extension of Pavlov’s behaviorist classification of signal systems, see GW 12: 11–191) and a speculative notion of world history. The most important concept binding these premises together is the idea of mimesis. Mimetic behavior, Lukács argues, is a fundamental way of human coping with the world and the source of both magic and art. Through the mimetic imitation of natural processes, humans acquire the ability to represent the salient aspects of the world in a closed and totalizing manner, and they gradually learn to separate such imitations from the necessity of immediate reaction. In contrast to magic which does not separate reflection and objective causation, mimesis in art is consciously taken as a reflection and evokes the aesthetic effect in its audience specifically in virtue of this feature (GW 11: 382). In other words, while both art and science overcome the superstition of magic, only art can retain the mimetic dimension of representation.