William Ernest Hocking

Born Aug. 10, 1873, in Cleveland, Ohio; died June 12, 1966, in Madison, N.H. American idealist philosopher, adherent of personalism.

Hocking was a professor at the University of California from 1906 to 1908, at Yale from 1908 to 1914, and at Harvard from 1914 to 1943. According to Hocking, the world is a collection of ideal substances (human consciousnesses that are part of the Absolute) that constitute the world consciousness, as a result of which they are able to communicate with each other. Each individual is an active source that creates reality. At the same time, the cause of this creativity is the Supreme Being, or god. Hocking believed that any body of teachings which excluded a deity was false. In his Science and the Idea of God (1944), Hocking attempted to show that science cognizes only the particular and that the universal can only be reached through religious experience. The individual cannot get along without god because the atheistic world view inevitably leads to the recognition of the senselessness of existence; human society cannot get along without god because in rejecting god it inevitably deifies the will of certain individuals. The association of elements of objective and subjective idealism is characteristic of Hocking.