If quarks and gluons are truly unobservable in a direct manner, this should be an inevitable consequence of the theory describing them. A formalism, within which 'internal fields' are automatically 'confined', is developed by considering a class of transformations of quantum mechanical states that have no explicit macroscopic manifestation. One of the necessary consequences of this formalism is standard non-Abelian gauge theory, which arises in such a way that the results presented here seem to be consistent with accepted gauge-theoretic descriptions of subnuclear phenomena.