““On both sides we encounter the idea that the Godhead possesses the power of Imagination, and that by imagining the universe God created it; that He drew this universe from within Himself, from the eternal virtualities and potencies of His own being; that there exists between the universe of pure spirit and the sensible world an intermediate world which is the idea of "Idea Images" as the �afis put it, the world of "supersensory sensi- bility," of the subtile magical body, "the world in which spirits are materialized and bodies spiritualized" ; that this is the world over which the Imagination holds sway; that in it the Imagina- tion produces effects so real that they can "mold" the imagining subject, and that the Imagination "casts" man in the form ( the mental body ) that he has imagined. In general we note that the degree of reality thus imputed to the Image and the crea- tivity imputed to the Imagination correspond to a notion of creation unrelated to the official theological doctrine, the doc- trine of the creatio e.x nihilo, which has become so much a part of our habits that we tend to regard it as the only authentic idea of creation. We might even go so far as to ask whether there is not a necessary correlation between this idea of a creatio e.x nikilo and the degradation of the ontologically creative Imagi- nation and whether, in consequence, the degeneration of the Imagination into a fantasy productive only of the imaginary and the unreal is not the hallmark of our laicized world for which the foundations were laid by the preceding religious world, which precisely was dominated by this characteristic idea of the Creation.””
