 Collingwood is not supposing that every work of art could in point of fact exist only people’s minds; of music, for example, he writes ‘[P]erhaps no one can do that [possess himself of the music] unless he does hear the noises’ (140; of course there are some prima facie counterexamples to this; later Beethoven, for example). The human imagination is typically too weak; in most cases we have to depend on the ‘bodily’ work of art for sensory helps. But in principle, the ‘total imaginative experience’ that constitutes the proper work of art must be conceived as only contingently related to the bodily work.