The imagination ... that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James Engell, Walter Jackson Bate (1984). “Biographia Literaria, Or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions”, p.156, Princeton University Press
