William James suggested that the critic of a major thinker place himself “at the centre of a man’s philosophic vision.” There is little doubt that this center is the foundational intuition of Being itself, i.e. the implied or, as the case may be, the explicit ontology. As Alfred North Whitehead saw it, the revolutionary turn in James’ radical reconstruction of thinking implied the overcoming of Cartesian dualism and the inauguration of an indiscrete ontology. An indiscrete ontology, as is well known, favors anti-intellectualism; that is to say, a skeptical attitude towards the ability of concepts and, ultimately, of language itself to appropriately state, convey, evaluate, or relate the essence of that which is. The processual dynamism of Being as experience in William James’ thought necessitates a strong emphasis on the philosophical imagination, as James himself insisted. Taken literally, a philosophical imagination will access Being and beings not by way of concepts but through visual or visionary means. The great modernist innovators of thinking chose a variety of strategies to articulate their basic intuitions: Emerson favored aphoristic reversals and paradoxes, Nietzsche, among other things, employed mythological narratives, Heidegger relied heavily on neologisms, and John Dewey preferred re-semanticizing ordinary language. For James, it is imagery which guides his fundamental philosophical reconstruction. William James’ elegantly metaphorical style is not sufficiently explained by his occasional stance as a popular orator. Images are the primary mode in James of providing access to that which is, images alone are proper means of providing the proper sense of a world pervaded by vagueness, defined as much by so-called entities as by transitions, fringes, haloes, and evanescent vistas. To engage this world, thinking not only employs images, but is aware of itself primarily and reflectively through imagistic renditions. The role of imagery in philosophy has been a subject of major critical interest in recent decades. In James, however, the variety of images, the shifting images of fluxional intuitions are not only a preliminary means of opening a space ultimately structured by conceptual relations, the shifting fields of images may or should be read as of the very fabric of mind and Being themselves.