What Is artful cognItIon?

The wheelwright said, “I, your servant, observe from my own work. In making a wheel, if I go slowly, it is easy but not a solid [fit]; if I go quickly, it is toilsome and [the parts] do not go together.1 Neither too slow nor too fast, I get it with my hands and respond with my mind, but my mouth cannot speak [of it]; there is a skill I maintain in this: I cannot teach it to my son, and my son cannot receive it from me. In this way, I am now seventy and have grown old making wheels. The ancients—and what they could not pass down—are dead. Thus what my lord is reading is just the dregs of the ancients.”2