William Ernest Hocking

William Ernest Hocking (August 10, 1873 – June 12, 1966) was an American idealist philosopher at Harvard University. He continued the work of his philosophical teacher Josiah Royce (the founder of American idealism) in revising idealism to integrate and fit into empiricism, naturalism and pragmatism. He said that metaphysics has to make inductions from experience: "That which does not work is not true." His major field of study was the philosophy of religion, but his 22 books included discussions of philosophy and human rights, world politics, freedom of the press, the philosophical psychology of human nature; education; and more. In 1958 he served as president of the Metaphysical Society of America. He led a highly influential study of missions in mainline Protestant churches in 1932. His "Laymen's Inquiry" recommended a greater emphasis on education and social welfare, transfer of power to local groups, less reliance on evangelizing and conversion, and a much more respectful appreciation for local religions.

William Ernest Hocking was born in 1873 to William Hocking (1839–1903) and Julia Pratt (1848–1936) in Cleveland, Ohio. He was of Cornish American heritage. He attended public schools through high school. He worked first as a mapmaker, illustrator and printer's devil, before entering Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts in 1894, where he intended to be an engineer. Reading William James' work The Principles of Psychology made him decide to go to Harvard to study philosophy, but he first worked for four years as a teacher and high school principal to earn the money for his studies.

In 1899 he entered Harvard, where he also studied with Josiah Royce in philosophy, earning his master's degree in 1901. From 1902 to 1903 he studied in Germany, at Göttingen, where he was the first American to study with Edmund Husserl, and in Berlin and Heidelberg. He returned to Harvard and completed his PhD in 1904.

Hocking began teaching as an instructor in comparative religion at Andover Theological Seminary. In 1906 he and his wife moved to the West Coast, where he joined the philosophy faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, under George Howison. In 1908 he was called to Yale, where he served as an assistant professor and published his first major work, The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912).

In 1914 Hocking returned to Harvard, where he eventually became Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity. During World War I, in 1917 he was among the first American civil engineers to reach the front in France. In 1918 he was appointed as an inspector of "war issues" courses in army training camps. His experience led him to write his second book, about morale. Returning to Harvard after the war, Hocking made the rest of his career there. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1921. From 1920 to the late-1930s, Hocking was a regular lecturer at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, where he lectured on "Morale," "Psychology," and "Leadership." Influenced by his visit to China, Hocking published a characteristically open minded study of the twelfth-century Chinese philosopher Zhu Xi. He argued that Zhu Xi's thought was "scientific," which not all European philosophers could claim, and therefore had something to teach westerners about democracy.

In 1936, Hocking was invited to give the Hibbert Lectures at Oxford and Cambridge universities in England. These reflected his thinking about the relation of Christianity to other world religions, as he had begun to support a universal religion. According to a review in TIME of the book containing his lectures, Hocking thought the important elements were

a belief in obligation, in a source of things which is good, in some kind of permanence for what is real in selfhood, and in the human aspect of deity." He pins his hope more on the common people throughout the world than on the theologians, finds in them a "universal sense of the presence of God, and the intuition of the direction in which the will of God lies.

Hocking was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1943. That same year, he retired to Madison, New Hampshire and lived there until his death 23 years later.