The newcomer to James will meet a philosopher whose language is bracingly lucid. For scholars of James however, this seeming virtue has presented itself as a kind of puzzle: In this context, James has often been faulted for his clarity – for a poetics that contradicts and even seems to undermine the key linguistic tenets of his own work. Those who admire James’s language may encounter a contrary problem: As teachers of James well know, despite his seeming legibility, his writing is apt to be misunderstood – easily reduced and simplified, his ideas taken in just the wrong way. This chapter recasts James’s stylistic choices in light of his early work on perceptual psychology, restoring his use of demonstration, diagram and self-experiment to an account of his rhetorical strategy – one that pertains across his long life of writing. Reading James at this angle resolves many of the seemingly difficult or even paradoxical parts of his thought: The assertion that “the world stands really malleable,” that the “absolute cannot be impossible,” that objects of experience may be taken “twice over,” and even the meaning of “conversion” itself. Understanding the ways in which James used the material at hand to reach his audience opens his work to more immediate, everyday use, while also modeling a mode of interpretation that makes “vague and inarticulate” effects in literature and art available to collective interrogation. Though James did not propose an overarching theory of the aesthetic, approaching James in this way shows the practice of interpretation to be central to the practice of pragmatism, as lived and experienced on a daily basis.