American Philosophy Read Free Page A

to the public library. But Hocking’s father hadn’t said he couldn’t check it out again. So that is what he did the next week. And this time he hid Spencer in the haymow of the barn and promptly lost his religion. This crisis of faith was Hocking’s first foray into metaphysical thought. His reading of William James’s The Principles of Psychology in the early 1890s was his second.
    By the time the teenage Hocking read the Psychology , James was well on his way to founding a school of thought known as American pragmatism. Pragmatism holds that truth is to be judged on the basis of its practical consequences, on its ability to negotiate and enrich human experience. James’s pragmatism was just grounded and practical enough to convince a would-be civil engineer that philosophy wasn’t a complete waste of time.
    On the way to philosophy Hocking toyed with the idea of studying religion exclusively. He was one of the youngest attendees of Chicago’s 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions, held in conjunction with the World’s Columbian Exposition. No one is sure, but he might have met his future teachers Josiah Royce and George Herbert Palmer at this event, as they both gave talks there. What we do know is that Hocking came to Cambridge to study philosophy at Harvard in 1899, finishing his undergraduate studies two years later.
    He was one of the last students to work under the “Philosophical Four”: James, Royce, Palmer, and George Santayana. Hocking, twenty-six at the time, didn’t waste the opportunity. Looking back on his student years, Hocking wrote, “I believed and believe it the strongest Department of Philosophy on the planet … it was strong because the individual men were strong, and sufficiently varied so that most students could see in some one or other of the central group one who spoke directly to his problems.”
    *   *   *
    Hocking’s reading of Spencer had disabused him of the notion of a benevolent and all-powerful God, and he desperately wanted to find some intellectually reputable replacement. He had come to work with James, but the famous psychologist-philosopher was in Europe when Hocking initially arrived. While he waited for James to return, Hocking mastered German and French, continued his study of mathematics and the physical sciences, and took classes on metaphysics and aesthetics with Royce and Santayana. “I worked greedily and happily,” he later wrote, “suffering only because I was limited to six classes at a time.”
    Hocking, however, was not your average bookworm. In the spring of 1900 he planned his first trip to Europe, to see the International Exposition in Paris. He was broke—“impecunious,” to use his word—so he and seven other Harvard students sought the help of a Mr. Buffum. Buffum was, according to Hocking, “a not too reputable cattleman’s Agent … of the waterfront of Boston” who hired the students as cattlemen on the SS Anglican . They shipped out of Charlestown, the primary port of Boston, on June 14. “We were interlarded,” Hocking wrote, “with eight experienced cattlemen to make four squads of four men each, to each squad being assigned 125 Texan steers.” The journey took twelve days, and they landed in Victoria Docks, London. The students were then set free for seven weeks to experience the best of European culture. The fusion of real life and high culture embodied an important strain of American philosophy that Hocking sought to preserve for the remainder of his life.
    Shortly after Hocking’s return to Harvard in the fall of 1900, William James also came back. James had been working on the manuscript of The Varieties of Religious Experience , a book that attempted to preserve a space for religious experience in a world increasingly dominated by science. As an undergraduate, Hocking attended the seminars James held