Here we shall not be dealing with imagination in the usual sense of the word: neither with fantasy, profane or otherwise, nor with the organ which produces imaginings identified with the unreal; nor shall we even be dealing exactly with what we look upon as the organ of esthetic creation. We shall be speaking of an absolutely basic function, correlated with a universe peculiar to it, a universe endowed with a perfectly "objective" existence and perceived precisely through the Imagination. Today, with the help of phenomenology, we are able to examine the way in which man experiences his relationship to the world without reducing the objective data of this experience to data of sense perception or limiting the field of true and meaningful knowledge to the mere operations of the rational understanding. Freed from an old impasse, we have learned to register and to make use of the intentions implicit in all the acts of consciousness or transconsciousness. To say 13 that the Imagination (or love, or sympathy, or any other sentiment) induces knowledge, and knowledge of an "object" which is proper to it, no longer smacks of paradox. Still, once the full noetic value of the Imagination is admitted, it may be advisable to free the intentions of the Imagination from the parentheses in which a purely phenomenological interpretation encloses them, if we wish, without fear or misunderstanding, to relate the imaginative function to the view of the world proposed by the Spiritualists to whose company the present book invites us. For them the world is "objectively" and actually threefold: between the universe that can be apprehended by pure intellectual perception (the universe of the Cherubic Intelligences) and the universe perceptible to the senses, there is an intermediate world, the world of Idea-Images, of archetypal figures, of subtile substances, of "immaterial matter." This world is as real and objective, as consistent and subsistent as the intelligible and sensible worlds; it is an intermediate universe "where the spiritual takes body and the body becomes spiritual," a world consisting of real matter and real extension, though by comparison to sensible, corruptible matter these are subtile and immaterial. The organ of this universe is the active Imagination; it is the place of theophanic visions, the scene on which visionary events and symbolic histories appear in their true reality. Here we shall have a good deal to say of this universe, but the word imaginary will never be used, because with its present ambiguity this word, by prejudging the reality attained or to be attained, betrays an inability to deal with this at once intermediate and intermediary world.
— Henry Corbin
Corbin is making a claim that still disturbs the assumptions most of us carry into depth work: that imagination is not decoration, not the soul's way of prettying up what it cannot face directly, but a cognitive organ with its own proper objects. The *mundus imaginalis* — this intermediate world he is charting — is not where the mind goes when it retreats from reality. It is where it goes to encounter a class of real things that neither sensory data nor rational argument can touch.
What this displaces quietly is the default hierarchy: fact at the top, feeling somewhere in the middle, imagination at the bottom as the least trustworthy faculty. Under that hierarchy, a dream is at best a symptom, a vision is at best a metaphor, and anything the Imagination insists upon counts as wish rather than knowledge. Corbin's Ibn 'Arabī refuses this. The imaginal figure — the angel, the theophanic event, the image that arrives with the force of encounter rather than invention — carries objective weight precisely because it cannot be reduced to what the senses report or the intellect processes.
The word he refuses — *imaginary* — is the refusal of a verdict. To call something imaginary is already to have acquitted oneself of the obligation to take it seriously. What he is asking for is a different posture toward the image: not analysis, not interpretation as translation into something more real, but reception.
Henry Corbin·Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi·1969