 The early Dilthey conceived his goal as a broadening of the critical project that would ground the human sciences as Kant had grounded the natural sciences. His hope then was that the human sciences would be able to arrive at lawful explanations just like the natural sciences. Up until at least 1887, when he published his Poetics, Dilthey was confident that inner explanations of human creativity could be arrived at. He himself formulated three laws of the imaginative metamorphosis to account for the uplifting effect that poets can have on us. Dilthey summarizes them as the laws of exclusion, intensification, and completion. Even in ordinary experience images are transformed by excluding what is no longer of interest and intensifying what remains based on our present interests. But what distinguishes poetic imagery is that it is also completed by the overall life-concerns of a powerful psyche. 