Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

This is the final post of a "philosophy week" and this is a blog with the phrase "Jamesian Philosophy" in its name.  So we come around to James' philosophy today. To his mind, I am sure, the relationship of mind and body was THE snaggiest and most consequential of philosophical issues.      In 1904, James wrote an introduction to an English translation to a work of Fechner, THE LITTLE BOOK OF LIFE AND DEATH,  He (James) wrote in the introduction that energy fluctuations "can be superimposed and compounded, the smaller on the greater, as wavelets upon waves.  This is as true in the mental as in the physical sphere. Speaking psychologically, we may say that a general wave of consciousness rises out of a subconscious background, and that certain portions of it catch the emphasis, as wavelets catch the light." A lot is happening in this brief passage.  One part of it is that James had a history of hostility to the idea of the compounding of consciousness....

Random quotation: On a certain sunny spring morning I went out to walk. The fields were green, the birds sang, the dew glistened, the smoke was rising,here and there a man appeared : a light as of transfiguration lay on all things. It was only a little bit of the earth; it was   only one moment of her existence, and yet as my look embracedher more and more it seemed to me not only so beautiful an idea, but so clear and true a fact, that she is an angel, an angel so rich and fresh and flower-like, and yet going her round in the skies so firmly and so at one with herself, turning her whole living face to Heaven, and carrying me along with her into that Heaven, that I asked myself how the opinions of men could ever have so spun themselves away from life so far as to deem the earth only a dry clod, and to seek for angels above it or about it in the emptiness of the sky, -- only to find them nowhere … :