In all I have related hitherto imagination was not present but only vision.

These are too often referred to as identical, and in what I have written I have tried to make clear the distinction.

If beyond my window I see amid the manifolded hills a river winding ablaze with light, nobody speaks of what is seen as a thing imagined, and if I look out of a window of the soul and see more marvels of shining and shadow, neither is this an act of imagination, which is indeed a higher thing than vision, and a much rarer thing, for in the act of imagination that which is hidden in being, as the Son in the bosom of the Father, is made manifest and a transfiguration takes place like that we imagine in the Spirit when it willed, "Let there be light."

Imagination is not a vision of something which already exists, and which in itself must be unchanged by the act of seeing,