Spotlight - William Ernest Hocking

              by Artur Wielgus

          William Ernest Hocking (1873 - 1966)

Professor Hocking was an American Philosopher and a writer. He was a professor of philosophy at Harvard University for almost 30 years. He was also a student of Josiah Royce, another brilliant American philosopher.

In the book, 'Science and the Idea of God', published by The University of North Carolina Press in 1944, professor Hocking reconciles science with God.
On page 4, he says, 'Science withdraws from making assertions about the whole of things, admits that its knowledge does not reach the whole, adding in parentheses a doubt whether 'the whole' is a knowable object.'

Religion (together with philosophy) responds that it is just the whole of things which is - if I may put it that way – its special province, and agrees that it is futile to oppose science on its own ground since science is nothing but organized truth.'

The real knowledge is distinct from the phenomenal for reasons which concern the man who is coming to believe, not the man who believes already.

He continues on page 5, 'Religion becomes the arbiter of ends and thus the primary organizer of the practical life of man, an office not less important than that of science itself.'

This distinction between knowledge and belief science was empirically ascertained, observes John Dewey in 'The Quest for Certainty', published by Minton, Balch and Co., New York – 1929, p.26.

'For empirical or observational sciences were placed in invidious contrast to rational sciences which dealt with eternal and universal objects, and which therefore were possessed of necessary truth,' Dewey says on page 27.
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'But was it not until about the middle of the nineteenth century that science was inclined to describe its attitude toward metaphysics and the like as ‘agnostic’?' observes Hocking on page 7.
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The answer may be that religion is to deal with the whole as a realm of value rather than of fact.'

Science in its essence is not committed to the physical.
Hocking proceeds, on p. 19, 'Without God, meaning is simply a human specialty. The vast universe is devoid of meaning. With God, the world has sense, perhaps a direction. And the whole frame of meaning returns upon our small lives to lend them significance; for meaning descends from the whole to the parts.'

He further says on p. 27 'What is modern is the assumption that states of mind are ‘phenomena’ in cause-and-effect relations with other phenomena, mental or physical and subject to exact measurement.'

Next, he states, on p. 47 'Now this is the difference between art and religion: that it is the real with which religion deals, while art deals with symbols of the real.'
Later in the book, professor Hocking asserts on p87 'Physics used to think of itself as the most concrete of all the sciences, dealing with the veritable stuff of things as they are. It now sees that it is an abstract science and for that reason cannot tell the whole truth.'

Next on page 92 he says,'No one ever discovers a quality apart from a quantity, nor a quantity apart from a quality. Why then adopt the weird hypothesis that the quantitative is objective, the qualitative only subjective?'

'Further, as Minkowski observed, we know nothing of place except at a time and nothing of time except at a place. Space and time are inseparable in experience and as Minkowski proceeded to show, inseparable also in respect to measurement.'

Then on page 105 he says, 'Since physical law faithfully transmits the inherent irregularity of the world from moment to moment, we may say that for physics the whole story of the cosmos conveys a fixed burden of irrationality.'

He recalls on page 114, ' It belongs to one of the conceptions of space dealt with in non-Euclidean geometry that a 'straight' line indefinitely prolonged will rejoin itself at an assumed origin, constituting a vast circle.'

Professor Hocking concludes, 'And here again, the experiment of getting on without God has led to a new perception of his presence. At the same time, whoever thus perceives the infinite universe as an edifice of truth to which our momentary feeling and thinking are instantly responding has been cured of the illusion of vastness, for he has touched, as directly as sensation itself, the garment of the living God.'

During his lifetime, W. E. Hocking published 22 books on various subjects, e.g.:human rights, freedom of the press, world politics, education, culture and morality.
He was a vital pillar among American philosophers and exerted a long-lasting impression on our culture.

© Art Wielgus 2008
 

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