The imaginative soul lies before as an evolutionary possibility because

Another relation between the senses and the too acutely self-conscious Ego is possible, besides that unhappy to and fro which characterizes the life of the modern intelligentsia. For we begin to understand how we can resolve the two once more into one. We go back now to all the richness and colour of the sentient-soul, but in such a way that it is redeemed. Sense-perception has become spiritual perception. And this is precisely the dramatic choice which lies before Imagination, as the Romantics understood it. Either it must go boldly forward and turn itself into clairvoyance (for clairvoyance is a partial reunion--or it must fall back and become--at best idle fancy, at worst, sensuality. (RCA 133)