 But the act of ‘preserving them’ has to be understood in a special sense. ‘There is no question’, says Collingwood, “of ‘externalizing’ an inward experience which is complete in itself and by itself” (304). Collingwood is denying that a painter could in point of fact dispense with the medium, even if in principle he could (in sense of ‘could in principle’ in which a man might run a hundred miles per hour). Instead, although ‘you see something in your subject, of course, before you begin to paint it’ (303), the ‘experience develops itself and defines itself in your mind as you paint’ (ibid.). The work of art develops by means of positive feedback between painting and experience. What develops is the ‘total imaginative experience’ that Collingwood identifies as the work of art, strictly speaking (304). Again, the work of art proper is not to be identified with the ‘bodily work’—the painted canvas, the sculpted bust—but with the experience of it. What is true that in point of fact the imaginative experiences requires the bodily work; the human imagination is not able to hold within it anything approaching the richness made available by the plastic arts. In particular, the ‘outward element’—the bodily work—provides the sensuous content or impressions out of which the conscious imagination generates ideas, constituting the ‘total imaginative experience’ (see Davies 2008 for more on this issue).