 Rand holds that our actions need guidance by a vision of the fundamental nature of the universe and of the efficacy of human thought and activity—a vision that can be grasped directly rather than requiring the conscious repetition of long chains of abstract reasoning. The chief function of art is to meet this psychological need by expressing abstract conceptual values and metaphysical truths in concrete perceptible form. Art, according to Rand, constitutes a selective, stylized re-creation of reality, with the principle of selection being the artist’s “sense of life”, a set of implicit “metaphysical value-judgments”, i.e., judgments about what is fundamentally significant about the world and our place in it. (There is controversy among Rand scholars as to whether what is re-created in art is certain elements of reality or reality as a whole, i.e., a “microcosm”, as well as how and whether the concept of re-creation applies to apparently non-representational forms of art: Torres and Kamhi 2000; Bissell 2004.) Both the artist’s creative work and the audience’s emotional responses to it are driven by their senses of life, that is, the worldviews they have “formed by a process of emotional generalization … a subconscious counterpart of a process of abstraction” (1966b: 27). The role of art in sustaining us psychologically by providing a concretization of our most fundamental values is a frequent theme in Rand’s fiction as well, especially The  Fountainhead.[12]