This chapter is about how William James’s ideas about consciousness can elucidate our understanding of what literature is and does. The thrust of the argument is that James’s psychology, in its insistence on and poetic invocation of consciousness as being nothing outside of the processing of the world as experienced, and the radically experiential and pluralistic philosophy built on this claim, offers a powerful alternative to the psychoanalytical models of consciousness as a mechanism of suppression and censorship that dominate the field of literary studies to this day, with vast implications for our conception of literature’s social function and use. The aim is to show how James’s ideas about consciousness are endowed with a radical openness to sense perception that comes with both an aesthetics of cognition and an ethics of democratic receptivity in tow; and to demonstrate that James fathoms these two strands as mutually engaged in a world-making operation that necessitates a literary imagination.