It is Aristotle, however, who sees the imagination as key to soul-craft. In some elliptic remarks in De Anima, he says that it’s impossible to think without images. So the imagination, or phantasia, is crucial to all forms of thinking. The imagination is a two-way ladder - it takes sensory information from the material world and spiritualizes it

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altogether—as from the world’s being present to the senses. Every mental act rests on the mind’s faculty of having present to itself what is absent from the senses. Re-presentation, making present what is actually absent, is the mind’s unique gift, and since our whole mental terminology is based on metaphors drawn from vision’s experience, this

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