 When we appreciate a painting, Lewis contends, what we contemplate is what this canvas could have in common with some optimal reproduction of it, namely, “that qualitative and abstract essence which is here incorporated, and is theoretically repeatable in some other physical object” (1946, 477). Lewis claims that an aesthetic object always depends upon some physical object, but he maintains that these dependency relations differ in degree: a poem depends on a particular inscription less than a work of visual art depends on a particular visible object. A poem, he proposes, is “an abstraction which is actualized in the instances of its presentation, through the medium of some physical vehicle. It is an entity essentially repeatable in, or common to, different physical events or things which instance it” (1946, 474–475). Lewis goes on to say that the abstractness of works is not like that of universals in that the latter “stand in contrast to anything which is sensuously qualitative and imaginal” (1946, 475). Lewis also maintains that a work or art is not just a type of visual appearance abstracted from a physical object, or in Lewis’s terms, an artistic vehicle. Instead, for Lewis, the aesthetic essence constitutive of the identity of the work of art, as opposed to the physical object, “lies in the context associated with this physical entity which presents it” (1946, 474, Lewis’s italics). Lewis holds that if the observer does not take this associated context into account in the interpretation of the vehicle, the work of art is misapprehended or not apprehended at all: “whatever the subject must bring to the presentation, in order correctly to understand the poem presented, belongs to the poem” (1946, 474).