Hillman is making a claim that tends to get softened in the reading: not that fantasy-images are important, or useful, or worth attending to — but that they are prior. Every sensation, every feeling, every "I notice" arrives already formed by imagination. You do not perceive and then imagine; the imagining is what makes perception possible. This is the inversion that his entire project rides on, and it lands differently than it first appears.

The usual move is to receive this as permission — yes, inner images matter, let's take them seriously. But the permission-reading misses the force. Hillman is not elevating the imagination from secondary status to primary consideration; he is saying that the physiological, the linguistic, the social, the behavioral are all downstream of image. None of them bottoms out. The brain does not generate soul; soul is what any description of the brain is already making images within. That is an uncomfortable reversal for any framework that wants a foundation outside the psyche, including the ones that feel most certain about their ground.

What this asks of the reader is not an expansion of curiosity but a willingness to let the images be the thing itself — not symbols pointing beyond, not symptoms pointing back, but finished products, Hillman says, already complete in what they are.