This essay was one of Collingwood's earliest attempts to define the aesthetic essence of art. His aim, he writes in the preface, is to state a general conception of art and develop its consequences. His conception is one already familiar through the writings of others - "that art is at bottom neither more nor less than imagination" - but from this observation he goes on to outline the various distinctions between subordinate conceptions of art, and to attempt to demonstrate their place in the general conception and the place of both in life. He urges that the meaningfulness of art cannot be torn from the imaginative setting in which it is embedded and that we must attempt to explain the process by which an artist reaches a particular point of view on reality.