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Our skill with metaphor, with thought, is one thing — prodigious and inexplicable; our reflective awareness of that skill is quite another thing— very incomplete, distorted, fallacious, over-simplifying. Its business is not to replace practice, or to tell us how to do what we cannot do already; but to protect our natural skill from the interferences of unnecessarily crude views about it; and, above, all, to assist the imparting of that skill — that command of metaphor — from mind to mind. And progress here, in translating our skill into observation and theory, comes chiefly from profiting by our mistakes.
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Ivor A. Richards (The Philosophy of Rhetoric (Galaxy Books))