Imagination is, he says, a force that allows us to engage with an Other in such a way that something new is disclosed to us, something that would otherwise have escaped our consciousness. But imagination is not the same thing as imagining. And it does so either by way of remembrance or by creating something completely new. Beauty and truth are, in Sallis' view, inextricably linked to nature. The elemental is that indescribable force of nature that resists our dualistic categories.
Elements are liminal things.
And they hint to us that there are certain truths in life that can be sensed or perceived but not described. During a thunderstorm, he writes, we recognize that we are not the masters of our world, but that something more fundamental than humanity itself encompasses our living and moving and being. And the elemental makes itself known to us through imagination. Elements allow the Other to show itself in ways that intellect alone can never accomplish. Of course, nature and the elements during the time of Coleridge differs from nature as we know it today.