 This means that the romantics took the work of art to be analogous to organisms in yet a stronger sense—not only in terms of its holistic unity, but also in terms of its life—its self-organization and self-judgment. Recall the sui generis character of artworks (discussed in  §3.2):  each work constitutes the norms according to which alone it could be properly judged. In romantic terms, every work has its own self-judgment. Seen as such, the artwork is not a mere artifact, but a quasi-organism in the sense that it organizes and regulates itself. And like other organic products of nature, the work too has, as it were, a life of its own, even though it is not self-organizing in the strict sense: 