It is sometimes said that we make the universe into a cosmos when we give it order. But cosmos also means "ornament," and it is also by ornamenting our inner and outer lives that we make a cosmos, a domain for psychological living. Insofar as we neglect imagination and images in our environment, to that extent we suffer neglect of soul and expose ourselves to psychological trouble.
— Thomas Moore
Moore is working from Ficino's Renaissance insistence that beauty is not decorative but ontological — not a quality we add to the world after we have understood it, but the condition under which the soul can be present to the world at all. The Greek word *cosmos* carries both meanings simultaneously, and Ficino felt the simultaneity as a law: ordering and adorning are not two projects but one. When we strip an environment of images — flatten a room, rationalize a schedule, translate every inner event into information — we are not gaining clarity. We are removing the medium through which soul moves.
What this asks is harder than it first sounds. The modern reflex is to organize, simplify, optimize — and that reflex has enormous psychological backing from every tradition that promises relief through transparency and control. Moore is saying the inverse: neglect of image is a form of self-abandonment, and the psychological trouble that follows is not accidental but structural. Soul needs something to adhere to. Imagination is not a surplus activity for people who have time for it; it is the tissue of psychological habitation itself. The cosmos is not given — it is continually made, and it is made by ornament, by the patient tending of images in one's inner and outer life.
Thomas Moore·The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino·1990