The creator does not see, he feels. What he feels is a certitude, the assurance of not being unequal to a task and of being bound to a particular path marked out by his previous works. But he also feels a desire which answers to a call: something wants to come into being, something on which he has reflected for a long time as a craftsman. These terms are untranslatable for the layman, both because of their reference to something personal and because of their technical character. It is with himself that the artist debates as he thinks out his colors, harmonies, or characters. What this act of meditation, which is like the labor of childbirth, strives to fix and deliver is something which wants to be. The work which the artist bears within him is, on this plane, already a demand. But it is only a demand, one entirely inside the creator. It is nothing he can see or imitate. In preparing himself for the execution-performance, the artist puts himself into a state of grace, and the demand which induces it is the expression of an inner logic—the logic of a certain technical development, of a peculiarly aesthetic searching, and of a spiritual maturation. All this comes together in the artist, who is precisely that individual in whom it all merges. More deeply than other men, he creates himself by creating and he creates because he creates himself.

—Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, 1953, p. 31

“Have I sawed it pretty straight?” John asked.

“We don’t praise apprentices much,” said Ebenezer, “especially when they are beginning, for fear it should make them conceited. People that know very little are always apt to be very vain of what little they do know.”

The Boy's Own Workshop: Or, The Young Carpenters by Jacob Abbott, 1866