American Philosophy Read Free

sign—indicating that the migration is over.
    When you reach Route 113 and turn right, you’re getting close. If you go through the tiny New Hampshire town of Chocorua and pass William James’s summer home, you know you’ve gone too far. James bought the house in 1886, when he’d finally made enough money as a Harvard philosopher to afford a retreat. But it’s not what you are looking for. Backtrack and travel 113 toward the village of Madison. You’ll pass a number of places selling antiques, sad little shops dedicated to helping people stay afloat in the present by selling off their pasts, entrusting their memories to strangers.
    Route 113 jogs left after a time and passes the borough hall. At this point fir and spruce trees grow right up to the shoulder of the road, making it impossible to see more than a hundred yards ahead or behind. This protected forest is a welcome reminder that not all old things go to waste. Turn left onto Mooney Hill Road and start up the hill. This is the road less traveled in American philosophy. In fact, it doesn’t look like it’s been traveled at all, at least not by anyone without four-wheel drive. Keep going. You think you might be lost. You are, in a sense—the terrain of philosophy you’re approaching has been largely unexplored for more than a century.
    At every fork in the road, take a left. A few miles on a deserted dirt road seems like forever, so you’ll be relieved to see the one-room schoolhouse ahead. Now turn right onto Janus Road and make the final ascent. If you look to your right, you’ll have a clear view of the Sandwich Range of the White Mountains, with Mount Washington off your right-hand shoulder. If you look to your left, at first you won’t see anything except white pine, but then you’ll catch sight of two stone buildings of Georgian architecture. One is a very large house. The other is set back in the woods, a short walk from the mansion. Covered with windows, it looks nothing like Holden Chapel. That’s the Hocking library. You’ve arrived at West Wind.
    *   *   *
    â€œTraveling is a fool’s paradise,” Emerson once said, “[since] my giant goes with me wherever I go.” That’s generally true, but when I travel to certain places, my giant leaves me alone long enough for me to think. William Ernest Hocking found—or rather made—one of these rare places at West Wind.
    Like many American philosophers, Hocking didn’t initially intend to become one. Born in Cleveland in 1873, he spent his teenage years in Joliet, Illinois. His mother came from the Pratt family of Southbridge, Massachusetts, previously from Plymouth Colony and, prior to that, from the Mayflower . His father, a Canadian, studied medicine in New York and Maryland before moving his family west in the early 1870s. Hocking, the first of five children, grew up in a staunch Methodist family and underwent what he would later call a “conversion experience” that cemented his teenage faith in the Almighty. After finishing high school in 1889, he worked for four years as a surveyor and mapmaker in an attempt to save enough money to enter the University of Chicago, but the financial panic of 1893 dashed these plans, and he settled for Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (now Iowa State University) instead.
    Hocking wanted to be an architect or an engineer—at least that was the plan, until he read Herbert Spencer’s First Principles in his third year of high school, at the tender age of fourteen. Spencer spent most of his career disseminating Darwin’s theory of evolution, a theory that would radically affect American philosophy in the coming century and, to this day, fundamentally challenge religious faith. When Hocking’s father discovered his son immersed in First Principles , he did what any reasonable Methodist would do: He insisted that his son return it