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.

In all men, said he, there has been not only a will to endure, but also a will to be worthy of enduring. The work of religion has been to assure "to the individual his right to live and take part in an infinite history." It has been the only agency capable of uniting the "wider prophetic purposes of man." Whenever man looks deep enough to penetrate the "basis of such certainties as we have, our self-respect, our belief in human worth, our faith in the soul's stability through all catastrophes of physical nature, and in the integrity of history . . . forever we must recognize there a mass of actual deed, once for all accomplished under the assurances of historic religion." It was, said Hocking, "a system of deed ... organized about a prophetic purpose once planted in history and now perpetually reproducing itself all around us."

The Eternal Mind. To Hocking, these prophetic purposes of man were just what the pragmatists and positivists were shunning. While they rejected such matters as unknowable and hence unworthy of speculation, Hocking regarded them as merely unfinished, and therefore the necessary basis for speculation. Plato, said he, was on the right track when he declared that the ultimate Ideas "are goals of which we already have an inkling, and the business of philosophy is to bring those latent perceptions to birth, which is recalling us to our true nature. But we can add this to Plato's view--that these same Ideas do not live by themselves in an abstract eternity; their place of being is in the purpose of the eternal Mind. And our share in those Ideas is the condition of our obligation to the world we live in."

Modern man, Hocking insists, has lost this anchor. He has placed change upon a pedestal, but behind change he has "nothing, absolutely nothing." Following the methods of science, he may have limbered up the world and given himself an illusion of freedom. But in the process, he has lost his ability to "discriminate between the outworn and the eternal."

One-Eyed Look. To save himself, man does not need to reject science or its method. But to look at the universe in only that way is to see with only one eye. What man must do is to discover the "healing fact"--the fact which only religion can furnish. "Myths," says Hocking, "there must be, since visions of the future must be clothed in imagery. But there are myths which displace truth and there are myths which give wings to truth . . . There are deeper myths, born of the permanent and universal aspirations of men, such as the dream of a future human fraternity. Such myths as these ... are never mere mythology, because they are founded on a literal and present truth.

"This truth is the healing fact of which we are in search ... It is accessible to every man, to the commoner and the pundit, on the same terms; yet it falls short of being notorious common knowledge because the ... single-eyed industriousness of inquiry which loses sight of the soul loses it also. It is the truth that the world, like the human self, has its unity in a living purpose. It is the truth of the existence of God."

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