For a good while, men of high intelligence have been extolling a strictly descriptive phenomenological theory of art, concerned with the work of art itself and with its effect upon the spectator or the audience. Moreover, theories exist which tend in this direction, but sometimes they are still contaminated with the methods of psychological aesthetics, and sometimes they devote too much effort to combating those methods and to defining their own theory rather than putting it to the test of application.

The work of art is an object that exists solely for the human understanding, but which exists for it objectively—that is to say, outside or beyond individual variations of perception. Anyone who wishes to achieve results in this field—provisional results, to be sure, but at least concrete and capable of being verified or corrected—must describe both the common denominators and the distinctive traits of such objects.