Human Nature and Its Remaking

William Ernest Hocking

1923-01 · Yale University Press

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Influenced by both William James and Josiah Royce, as well as by early initiation into science and engineering, William Ernest Hocking described his philosophical thinking as composed of "realism... mysticism... idealism also, its identity not broken." He once said, "I wish to discern what character our civilizations, now unsteadily merging into a single world civilization, are destined to take in the foreseeable future, assuming that we have a foreseeable future." The Harvard "President's Report" (1965--66) said of him that he was "a scholar who bridged the years from the admired era of Santayana, Palmer, Royce and James to our own times. His school of thought has been called objective idealism, or in his own words "non-materialistic realism,' a kind of blend of the pragmatic and the idealistic. His first book, The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912), which drew on James's pragmatism and Royce's idealism, established his reputation and became a classic in the region between philosophy and theology. This was the beginning of a long line of books and articles that for half a century brought his characteristic "warmth, clarity and insight (in the words of a colleague) to a variety of human problems ranging from ethics to education. A sampling of [his] titles will suggest the reach of his ecumenical temper...." Mr. Hocking graduated from the College in 1901 and took his doctorate in 1904. After a period at Berkeley and at New Haven, he returned here as Professor of Philosophy in 1914 and five years later was elected to the Alford Chair. Although he became Emeritus in 1943, he remained active and intellectually alert to the end of his life, conducting a large and lively correspondence with friends, colleagues and students the world over and lending the kindly sagacity of a great teaching mind to countless admiring younger men and women."