(Excerpt from Morale and Its Enemies
And there is a wider...)
Excerpt from Morale and Its Enemies
And there is a wider element in the psyche of this war which must not be evanescent, and cannot be I mean the international esprit dc corps which has been created among the members of the Allied arms including their junior associate, the discoveries of people by people, brought about by the forced mental excursions of war.
There have been critics of England among us, and critics of France; but no one who had fairly known the England or the France that bore the brunt of the war could have continued to hold these feelings dominant. England is inwardly the most diverse of all nations: it is not identical with any single party or government; judged by the acts and opinions of fragments here and there, or of Parliaments or of cabinets, it is not faultless,-and I know of no nation that is. But the phrases, the heart of England, or the soul of France, are not empty phrases: it is by the quality of its persistent national purposes that a people is to be judged.
There are traits in the England of John Bull and Tory tradition, just as there are in the America of dollar-worshipping tradition, which have few lovers in the world, and deserve few. But this is not America; nor are these England. There is a con siderate and liberal England, an England that sweareth to its own hurt and changeth not, a chival rous England, a nobly generous England, eager to give in all ways more than due credit to its associates and neighbors. These are the real England. Let me quote here a few words from a letter that came to me recently.
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The Meaning Of God In Human Experience: Philosophic Study Of Religion
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Re Thinking Missions a Laymen S Inquiry After One Hundred Years
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William Ernest Hocking was an American philosopher and educator. He served as an idealist philosopher at Harvard University.
Background
Hocking was born on August 10, 1873, in Cleveland, Ohio. He was the son of William Francis Hocking, a homeopathic physician who migrated to the United States from Canada, and Julia Carpenter Pratt, a descendant of the Mayflower passenger Degorie Priest.
Education
Hocking and his four younger sisters received a strict Methodist upbringing. Only fifteen when he graduated from high school in Joliet, Illinois, Hocking spent four years as a surveyor and civil engineer. In 1893 he attended the University of Chicago for one semester but lacked the money to continue. The next year Hocking entered the Iowa State College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts. There he read William James's Principles of Psychology and decided to study with James at Harvard University. Hocking left Iowa State College in 1895 and taught school in Davenport, Iowa, to save for his Harvard studies.
Entering the university in 1899, he concentrated on philosophy and psychology, benefiting from a brilliant Harvard faculty that included Josiah Royce, George Santayana, George Herbert Palmer, and Hugo Münsterberg as well as James. Royce's influence on Hocking proved the most decisive. Hocking received his Baachelor of Arts in 1901 and remained at Harvard to complete his Master of Arts the following year.
He then studied in German universities at Göttingen, Berlin, and Heidelberg. While at Göttingen, he was one of the first Americans to work with the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. Hocking received his Ph. D. at Harvard in 1904 and became an instructor in comparative religion at Andover (Massachussets) Theological Seminary.
Career
Hocking and his wife started the innovative Shady Hill School in 1915. Founded in their Cambridge home, the school became one of the leading educational experiments in the United States. The Hockings moved west in 1906, and Hocking spent two years in the philosophy department at the University of California at Berkeley. Hocking next accepted a position at Yale University, where he taught for six years, rising to professor of philosophy in 1913.
At Yale he published his first major book, The Meaning of God in Human Experience: A Philosophic Study of Religion (1912). This work put Hocking in the front rank of American philosophers, and it remains his magnum opus. Exploring the borderland between philosophy and theology, the book interprets James's pragmatism and Royce's idealism to create Hocking's own philosophical system. A version of objective idealism, or "nonmaterialistic realism, " as he sometimes called it, this outlook focused on the philosophical issues that concerned Hocking throughout his life: the purpose and destiny of human existence, human awareness of God, and the fundamentally social nature of reality.
Hocking left Yale in 1914 to become professor of philosophy at Harvard University. During World War I he received officers' training and in 1916 became a captain in the army, serving as an instructor in military engineering for the Reserve Officers Training Corps at Harvard. In 1917 the British Foreign Office requested that he visit the British and French fronts to study the psychology of morale. These investigations resulted in Morale and Its Enemies (1918).
After working as inspector of war-issues courses for the army in 1918, Hocking resumed teaching philosophy at Harvard. Named Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity in 1920, he occupied that chair until 1943, when he retired to the mountaintop home he had built at Madison, New Hampshire.
He lectured widely at home and abroad and gave the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, in 1938-1939. Hocking published some twenty books, including Human Nature and Its Remaking (1918; revised 1923), The Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights (1926), and Man and the State (1926). The last two linked Hocking's metaphysical and religious perspectives to his persistent concern with the practical realities of social existence. Those concerns expanded when Hocking visited the Middle East in 1928. Reflecting on his experiences in that region, he published The Spirit of World Politics: With Special Studies of the Near East (1932), which explored the ethical foundations necessary for international cooperation.
Meanwhile, many college students read his Types of Philosophy (1929; revised 1939 and 1959). Hocking gave the 1936 Powell Lectures at Indiana University, published as Lasting Elements of Individualism (1937) and dedicated to John Dewey. Along with Strength of Men and Nations (1959), these works suggested that despite international conflicts, Hocking discerned signs pointing toward a more humane and harmonious world.
He died on June 12, 1966 in Madison, New Hampshire.
Hocking's hopes for religious ecumenicity were expressed in Living Religions and a World Faith (1940). Derived from his 1936 Hibbert Lectures, this book asserted that the world's religions should replace their sectarian divisiveness with mutual appreciation; religious diversity, he argued, could deepen the spiritual awareness of all persons.
Politics
Hocking was interested in Middle Eastern politics. Visiting India, China, and Japan in 1932, he also became a staunch advocate of interreligious dialogue.
Views
Hocking was interested in analyzing the personal dimensions of human life. Based on his Terry Lectures at Yale University, The Self: Its Body and Freedom (1928) elaborated Hocking's conviction that selfhood entails purposive interaction with others. Later he used concepts from physics to suggest that the self is a "field of fields. "
Quotations:
"I find that a man is as old as his work. If his work keeps him from moving forward, he will look forward with the work. "
"We cannot swing up on a rope that is attached only to our own belt. "
"Only the man who has enough good in him to feel the justice of the penalty can be punished. "
"Man is the only animal that contemplates death, and also the only animal that shows any sign of doubt of its finality. "
Membership
In 1958 Hocking served as president of the Metaphysical Society of America.
Interests
Hocking had a lifelong interest in art, architecture, farming, carpentry, and painting.
Connections
Hocking married Agnes Boyle O'Reilly, a schoolteacher, on June 28, 1905. They had three children.