whittles his stick to a point: that is, he is "making" something.
His knife, almost before he is aware of what he is doing, follows a
pattern--invented in his brain on the instant or remembered from other
patterns. He gets pleasure from the sheer muscular activity, and from
his tactile sense of the bronze or steel as it penetrates the softer wood.
But he gets a higher pleasure still from his pattern, from his sense of
making something, no matter how idly. And as soon as the pattern or
purpose or "design" is recognized by others the maker's pleasure is
heightened, sharable. For he has accomplished the miracle: he has thrown
the raw material of feeling into form--and that form itself yields
pleasure. His "bit of fiat" has taken a piece of wood and transformed it:
made it expressive of something. All the "arts of design" among primitive
races show this pattern-instinct.

But the impulse toward an ordered expression of feeling is equally
apparent in the rudimentary stages of music and poetry. The striking of
hands or feet in unison, the rhythmic shout of many voices, the regular
beat of the tom-tom, the excited spectators of a college athletic contest
as they break spontaneously from individual shouting into waves of
cheering and of song, the quickened feet of negro stevedores as some one
starts a tune, the children's delight in joining hands and moving in a
circle, all serve to illustrate the law that as feeling gains in intensity
it tends toward ordered expression. Poetry, said Coleridge, in one of his
marvelous moments of insight, is the result of "a more than usual state of
emotion" combined "with more than usual order."

What has been said about play and sharable pleasure and the beginning of
design has been well summarized by Sidney Colvin:
[Footnote: Article on "The Fine Arts" in _Encyclopaedia Britannica_.]