Reason incarnate in existence

Before summarizing our first approach to the word tzelem, I sense, as I always have, a great tension, that needs to be allowed to dissipate. Let us all take a deep breath, as we gently allow our intuition to to move our souls past their initial starting points.

Thank you commentors for your initial salvo. Perhaps we all can benefit from reminding ourselves of Rambam's advice, in approaching translation. In essence, he notes that translation, must be done in the context of thinking about a subject, a real world area, that the word or piece is about.

Let me premise one canon. Whoever wishes to translate, and purposes to render each word literally, and at the same time to adhere slavishly to the order of the words and sentences in the original, will meet with much difficulty; his rendering will be faulty and untrustworthy. This is not the right method. The translator should first try to grasp the sense of the subject thoroughly, and then state the theme with perfect clearness in the other language. This, however, can not be done without changing the order of the words, putting many words for one word, or vice versâ, and adding or taking away words, so that the subject be perfectly intelligible in the language into which he translates. This method was followed by Honein ben Is'hak with the works of Galen, and his son Is'hak with the works of Aristotle. It is for this reason that all their versions are so peculiarly lucid, and therefore we ought to study them to the exclusion of all other. 

We may not be perfectly aligned in the word we choose as most similar to tzelem. Yehuda and Micha chose "model", Dan -essence I chose "principle" and Hagyan chose the phenomenon which is to be gleaned from craftmanship as in Yirmiyahu.

יח הדבר אשר היה אל-ירמיהו, מאת יהוה לאמר: ² קום וירדת בית היוצר; ושמה אשמיעך את-דברי: ³ וארד בית היוצר; והנהו (והנה-הוא) עשה מלאכה על-האבנים: ⁴ ונשחת הכלי, אשר הוא עשה בחמר ביד היוצר; ושב, ויעשהו כלי אחר, כאשר ישר בעיני היוצר לעשות:    פ
⁵ ויהי דבר-יהוה אלי לאמור: ⁶ הכיוצר הזה לא-אוכל לעשות לכם בית ישראל נאם-יהוה; הנה כחמר ביד היוצר, כן-אתם בידי בית ישראל:    ס    ⁷ רגע אדבר, על-גוי ועל-ממלכה; לנתוש ולנתוץ ולהאביד:

The common thread of meaning here is, I think, that pointed to by Einstein in his phrase- reason incarnate in existence. This phrase, I think, refers to our foundational intuition that there is in fact an expression of idea in the external things we see around us. It is not just Newton who can apprehend a unifying idea actually expressed in the material apples around us- we all can apprehend a reason incarnate in the things around us.

Model
refers to reason incarnate in existence in the sense of an approximation of our minds, due to our limited apprehension of reason incarnate in existence.

Essence and principle
refer to the underlying idea expressing itself via the core properties of a thing such as the ability to speak and act justly, rather than details such as color in a man. This notion is of the external thing, more so than the limitations of our apprehension.

Hagyan's sense of craftsmanship pointed to by  Yirmiyahu similarly refer to this sense of reason incarnate in existence, in the sense that a craftsman imprints an idea or design, upon his material, producing a product, expressive of the idea in its structure.