Imagination and the fashioning of forms

Meaning

In I.4.1 primordial matter is invisible and must be apprehended through imagination or understanding rather than treated as an already visible body. This is an epistemic role: the faculty gives access to a proposed beginning beyond immediate sensation. It does not mean that imagining a substance brings it physically into existence.

I.9.3 assigns imagination a formative role in the relation of soul, spirit and body. Soul imagines or fashions; spirit receives the resulting power and embodies it. The two uses are related but not identical: the investigator apprehends what is hidden, while the soul's formative activity belongs to the author's explanation of generation. In neither case is spirit absolutely severed from body. The source therefore calls for attention to the imagining subject rather than a blanket equation of imagination with fantasy.