§ 456. Thus even the association of ideas is to be treated as a
subsumption of the individual under the universal, which forms their
connecting link. But here intelligence is more than merely a general form:
its inwardness is an internally definite, concrete subjectivity with a
substance and value of its own, derived from some interest, some latent
concept or Ideal principle, so far as we may by anticipation speak of
such. Intelligence is the power which wields the stores of images and
ideas belonging to it, and which thus (2) freely combines and subsumes
these stores in obedience to its peculiar tenor. Such is creative
imagination(140)—symbolic, allegoric, or poetical imagination—where the
intelligence gets a definite embodiment in this store of ideas and informs
them with its general tone. These more or less concrete, individualised
creations are still “syntheses”: for the material, in which the subjective
principles and ideas get a mentally pictorial existence, is derived from
the data of intuition.
§ 457. In creative imagination intelligence has been so far perfected as
to need no helps for intuition. Its self-sprung ideas have pictorial
existence. This pictorial creation of its intuitive spontaneity is
subjective—still lacks the side of existence. But as the creation unites
the internal idea with the vehicle of materialisation, intelligence has
therein _implicitly_ returned both to identical self-relation and to
immediacy. As reason, its first start was to appropriate the immediate
datum in itself (§§ 445, 455), i.e. to universalise it; and now its action
as reason (§ 458) is from the present point directed towards giving the
character of an existent to what in it has been perfected to concrete
auto-intuition. In other words, it aims at making itself _be_ and be a
fact. Acting on this view, it is self-uttering, intuition-producing: the
imagination which creates signs.