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The Cloud of Unknowing

Reason, Will, Imagination, and Feeling [emotions and sensory systems]  are man's vital working powers through which he processes the data of reality.

I call some of man's faculties primary and others secondary not because man's spirit is divisible but because the data they process is divisible into two main categories.

The first includes all the data related to spirit, which I call primary, and the second includes everything related to matter, which I call secondary.

When the two principal powers, Reason and Will, deal directly with spiritual things, they can function independently of Imagination and Feeling.  Imagination and Feeling deal with the material, both present and absent. They reside in the body and function through the medium of the body's five senses.

But whereas Reason and Will function autonomously, Imagination and Feeling require the assistance of Reason and Will in order to grasp even material things in their entirety. The nature, causes, character, and excellence of material things are inaccessible to Imagination and Feeling unaided by the primary faculties.

To sum up, then, Reason and Will are called primary because they are not material and can function independently of the other faculties.