The Law of Help is a development of Ruskin 's concept of the associative imagination, and was first introduced in Modern Painters V (1860), where the principle of composition in pictures - 'the help of everything... by everything else' ( Works, 7.205) - is perceived equally in the growth of leaves, the movement of clouds, and the structure of an ideal society. For a discussion of this in the context of the Liber Studiorum, see Davis, The 'dark clue' and the Law of Help.