Hillman is not making a methodological point here — he is diagnosing a refusal. The long philosophical tradition that asks "what is soul?" and waits for a definition is already, in its form of waiting, asking soul to become something other than itself. A definition is abstract, bounded, transferable; it works precisely by stripping away the particular image. Soul, on this account, cannot hand itself over to that kind of question without ceasing to be what it is.

What the passage opens is the problem of self-knowledge as desire. The soul wants to know itself — that wanting is real, and it has its own constitution. It is not the philosopher's desire for clarity; it is not the mystic's desire for unity. It moves toward images, stories, the *recit* Corbin names: narrative that does not leave the imaginal register to deliver a conclusion. The moment self-knowledge becomes a definition, it has already bypassed what it set out to find.

This means the failure of abstract soul-talk is not accidental. Every clean formulation dissolves something the image was holding. Hillman's insistence on metaphor throughout is not a style preference — it is an argument that soul is only faithfully met where the image remains undissolved, where the account stays inside its own strangeness rather than translating out of it.