 In attempting to convey the richness and depth of lived experience, the human sciences must also consider the contribution of the arts. Aesthetics constitutes an important cultural system in that it can provide a sense of how the arts can contribute to human understanding in general. Dilthey’s Poetics of 1887 represents an effort to develop certain psychological concepts to explicate the workings of the poetic imagination. Even in ordinary life, the images we extract from experience are subject to metamorphosis. With time all our images are transformed, for “the same image can no more return than the same leaf can grow back on a tree the following spring” (1887/SW.V, 102). The first law of metamorphosis involves the exclusion of those constituents of images that are not valuable to us. Not every apprehended constituent is worth remembering. According to Dilthey we do not just passively absorb every impression that comes our way. We filter out what is not worth perceiving by a process of apperception. This apperception is guided by what is called an “acquired nexus of psychic life”. Because this gradually acquired nexus differs for each subject, the process of exclusion never has the same outcome.