Had it not been so, then it could not have developed to its present or, indeed, to any state. I think we can answer this, even now, by watching carefully how our minds function. As the contents and lineaments of the Kingdom of Reason become ever greater and more imposing, ever more powerful in fact, we less and less have recourse to first principles of mentation, until we even tend to downgrade the imagination, thinking it merely the fiction-making faculty which has been called 'the fancy' in earlier times. In part this is understandable in that the power of reason having become so great it is possible for reason to content itself with making fresh permutations of the known and calling them 'the new'. Reason itself is a vast data bank of memories which is being constantly sorted and classified by a computer operated by the human will.
Feeling is the basic plasma of all beings.
For without feeling there can not be that initial detection of things unknown via the physical or psychical senses. Even to a consciousness such as ours which is now so cluttered with things known, nothing genuinely new can be drawn towards the mind, without feeling. And this, incidentally, is why the imagination is so much more nearly allied to feeling, and things of feeling, matters of feeling, than the more conservative and passive faculty we call 'reason'. Indeed, given the history of the word reason which, for example, in Milton's day was scarcely distinguishable from what we now term 'imagination', it is probable that reason itself was an invention of the imagination. In art, in science, in life, the imaginative faculty has primacy of place, for we are too conscious now to go back to being creatures of pure feeling sans intellect.