We wish to stress on the one hand the notion of the Imagination as the magical production of an image, the very type and model of magical action, or of all action as such, but especially of creative action; and, on the other hand, the notion of the image as a body (a magical body, a mental body), in which are incarnated the thought and will of the soul.2 The Imagination as a creative magical potency which, giving birth to the sensible world, produces the Spirit in forms and colors; the world as Magia divina "imagined" by the Godhead, that is the ancient doctrine, typified in the juxtaposition of the words Imago and Magia, which Novalis rediscovered through Fichte.3 But a warning is necessary at the very outset: this Imaginatio must not be confused with fantasy. As Paracelsus already observed, fantasy, unlike Imagination, is an exercise of thought without foundation in nature, it is the "madman's cornerstone."4 This warning is essential. It is needed to combat the current confusion resulting from conceptions of the world which have brought us to such a pass that the "creative" function of the 212 Imagination "is seldom spoken of and then most often metaphorically." Such vast efforts have been expended on theories of knowledge, so many "explanations" (partaking of one form or another of psychologism, historicism, or sociologism) have had the cumulative effect of annulling the objective significance of the object, that our thinking, measured against the gnostic conception of an Imagination which posits real being, has come to be an agnosticism pure and simple. On this level all terminological rigor is dropped and Imagination is confounded with fantasy. The notion that the Imagination has a noetic value, that it is an organ of knowledge because it "creates" being, is not readily compatible with our habits. No doubt a preliminary question is in order: What, essentially, is the creativity we attribute to man? But is an answer possible unless we presuppose the meaning and validity of his creations? How can we accept and begin to elucidate the idea that man feels a need not only to surpass given reality but also to surmount the solitude of the self left to its own resources in this imposed world (to surmount his only-I-ness, his Nur-Ich-Sein, which can become an obsession bordering on madness), unless we have first, deep within ourselves, experienced this need to go beyond, and arrived at a decision in that direction? True, the terms "creative" and "creative activity" are part of our everyday language. But regardless of whether the purpose of this activity is a work of art or an institution, such objects, which are merely its expressions and symptoms, do not supply an answer to the question: What is the meaning of man's creative need? These objects themselves have their places in the outside world, but their genesis and meaning flow primarily from the inner world where they were conceived; it is this world alone, or 213 rather the creation of this inner world, that can share in the dimension of man's creative activity and thus throw some light on the meaning of his creativity and on the creative organ that is the Imagination. Accordingly, everything will depend on the degree of reality that we impute to this imagined universe and by that same token on the real power we impute to the Imagination that imagines it; but both questions depend in turn on the idea that we form of creation and the creative act. As to the imagined universe, the reply will perhaps take the form of a wish or challenge, because there has ceased to be a schema of reality admitting of an intermediate universe between, on the one hand, the universe of sensory data and the concepts that express their empirically verifiable laws, and, on the other hand, a spiritual universe, a kingdom of Spirits, to which only faith still has access. The degradation of the Imagination into fantasy is complete. An opposition is seen between the fragility and gratuitousness of artistic creations and the solidity of "social" achievements, which are viewed as the justification and explanation of developments in the artistic world. In short, there has ceased to be an intermediate level between empirically verifiable reality and unreality pure and simple.
— Henry Corbin
Corbin is pointing at a disappearance that most people don't notice because they've inherited only the two remaining options: the empirically verifiable on one side, and on the other a "kingdom of Spirits" to which only faith still reaches. Between them, nothing. The *mundus imaginalis* — the intermediate world, the realm in which images have real ontological weight — was simply dissolved, not disproved, dissolved, and the word "imagination" was handed down to describe what remained: fantasy, groundless confection, the madman's cornerstone Paracelsus already warned against.
The distinction Corbin is drawing is not precious. When Imagination is understood as a cognitive organ — as something that *posits* real being rather than decorating it — what you encounter in an image is not your projection but a disclosure. The image has the same kind of standing that a sensory percept has: it makes claims on you. Once that standing is lost, the inner world becomes merely expressive, a symptom of something whose real explanation lies elsewhere, in social forces or neurological substrate or personal history. The soul's images get read as symptoms of the world, never as its organs of knowledge. Corbin's question — what is the meaning of man's creative need? — cannot be answered from that reduced position, because the objects creativity produces, the artworks and institutions, are precisely its expressions, its residue. The creative act itself happens in the very world that has been declared non-existent.
Henry Corbin·Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi·1969