Education: The Healer

His devout Methodist father had expressly forbidden him to read the book, but 13-year-old William Ernest Hocking of Joliet, Ill. could not resist the temptation. A usually obedient boy, he sneaked Herbert Spencer's First Principles out to the haymow, read with horrified fascination the book's conclusion that whatever Supreme Power might lie behind the universe, it "is utterly inscrutable." When he had finished, young Hocking realized that "father was right: the damage was done. I had started out life with a perfectly sound brand of orthodox religion. Now, I had lost it all. I was obliged to work the thing out for myself."

William Hocking has spent a lifetime working the thing out. In so doing, he won fame as one of the top half-dozen U.S. philosophers of his day. A tall, courtly scholar, he made all knowledge his province, and in an age of shriveling faith and swelling skepticism, he steadfastly refused to repudiate the universe or the God who made it. This week, as he turned 80, William Hocking occupied a place as the nation's foremost living exponent of Idealism—one of the least heeded, but most healing, of all philosophies.

Cheapest Place. Hocking became a professional philosopher almost by accident. He started out to be an engineer, had already enrolled at Iowa State College as "the cheapest possible place to get an education." Then, one day in the college library, he began reading the works of William James. "Right then," says he, "I decided to aim for the place where James taught."

At Harvard, he found not only William James but also Idealist Josiah Royce. Hocking promptly adopted both these men as "my honored masters." In the first, he found a challenge, in the second, a response. Over the next 40 years, he gradually molded that response into an eloquent philosophy of his own, passed it on to hundreds of Harvard students. Though of formal bearing, he never lacked fire: it was the fire of a man who believed with all his heart that "to know that the world has a meaning [is] the philosophic minimum."

Whatever Works. In his search for that meaning, Hocking was willing to meet the pragmatists on their own ground. Though he rejected the principle that "whatever works is true," he regarded the negative statement that "whatever does not work is not true" as a valid test for any philosophy. In his first book, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, he boldly applied the test to religion.