Hillman is correcting a mistake so habitual it feels like anatomy: the belief that soul lives inside the skin. For two and a half millennia the movement of interiority has been a movement inward and upward — away from the world, toward the private, the spiritual, the transcendent. What gets called "inner work" in this tradition is really a progressive withdrawal, soul becoming a possession of the person who owns it, the world left behind as mere surface.

What the passage insists is that "within" is not a direction but a perception — the recognition that things carry interiority, that a river or a stone or a conversation has an inside to it, a significance that is not projected there by me but discovered as already present. The moment that recognition opens, the vessel problem dissolves. You do not need to be the container if natural life itself becomes one. Anima is not located; she is the locating — the act of finding interiority wherever attention goes deep enough to notice it.

This matters because the retreat into personal interiority is itself a form of the pneumatic preference: the soul secured inside the individual, elevated above the mess of the world. What Hillman is proposing is not a wider interiority but a different one — porous, distributed, belonging to things before it belongs to anyone.