Their notions abetted the murder of the world's soul by cutting apart the heart's natural activity into sensing facts on one side and intuiting fantasies on the other, leaving us images without bodies and bodies without images, an immaterial subjective imagination severed from an extended world of dead objective facts.
— James Hillman
Hillman is naming a wound that most psychology still administers as cure. The division he describes — sensation on one side, intuition on the other — looks like epistemological housekeeping, a tidy arrangement of faculties. What it actually accomplished was the evacuation of soul from the world's body. When imagination is confined to the subject and matter is confined to the object, neither side can be truly alive: images float free of weight and consequence, and the extended world becomes a collection of neutral facts awaiting human meaning to be projected onto them. The cosmos stops speaking. It becomes resource, backdrop, problem.
What gets lost in that arrangement is precisely what *sebas* — awe, the shudder before what is genuinely other — requires: a world that has its own interiority, its own claim on the heart. Hillman's counter-move is not to reunite the faculties by an act of will, as if we could simply decide to feel the world again. The damage runs deeper than decision. But the severance can be noticed, and noticing it is already a different posture than the one that performed it. The fantasy that clings to your chest when you stand before a particular landscape, or a particular face, is not yours alone — it is the world thinking through you, and the heart that receives it is doing something neither purely sensory nor purely imaginary.
James Hillman·The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World·1992