 This last law of imaginative completion applies only to artists and allows them to articulate the essential meaning of life-situations—through them we come to see what is typical in life. These laws of metamorphosis are conceived as explanative to the extent that they appeal to an overall acquired psychic nexus as their ultimate context. But a more comprehensive descriptive account shows these laws to be rather schematic and unable to capture all the qualitative changes that result for our understanding of the world more generally. And for that reason Dilthey backs away from pure psychological explanations after 1887. In the essay “Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics” of 1892 he redescribes imaginative metamorphosis more structurally. A portrait painter is said to order the structure of what is objectively perceived 