Since 1903, members of Arts and Letters have delivered commemorative tributes to fellow members who have passed away. These remarks celebrate and reflect on the lives and work of the members being honored and acknowledge their contribution to the arts. A selection of tributes is now available in the digital archive below. As we prepared this archive, we were reminded that these tributes reflect their times, and, in some instances, include terminology and social and moral judgments we do not endorse.
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At the ripe age of ninety-two years, death came to one of the most distinguished American philosophers, William Ernest Hocking. He died at his home in Madison, New Hampshire, where he had lived since his retirement from the philosophical faculty of Harvard University in 1943. The range of his interests was most accurately described in the definition of the chair he held at Harvard. He was Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy and Civil Policy.
Professor Hocking not only contributed his philosophical learning to each of these subordinate subjects but also he left his creative mark upon all of them. Hocking was the student at the turn of the century of the "Big Four" of Harvard philosophy: Josiah Royce, William James, George Herbert Palmer, and George Santayana. The renowned German psychologist, Hugo Münsterberg, was also in this galaxy of stars which reigned at Harvard in the heyday of these disciplines. In a sense Hocking was the last link with that glorious era.
After doing graduate work at Harvard, Hocking finished his graduate studies at the universities of Goettingen, Berlin, and Heidelberg. He taught at the University of California and at Yale before beginning his distinguished Harvard career in 1920. Hocking was invited to give the famous Gifford lectures at Glasgow University in 1937-39 and the Hibbert lecture at Oxford in 1938.
Hocking has usually been described as an "idealist" in the strict categories of the schoolmen of metaphysics. But the pragmatic thought of William James obviously influenced him almost as much as did the thought of his master, Josiah Royce. It was more important that the range of his competence included all the subordinate disciplines, defined in the Alford chair which he so brilliantly adorned for a quarter-century. This range of interest and competence is vividly defined in his voluminous works, published in three decades of creative scholarship.
His first volume, published in 1912, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, drew upon anthropology and psychology in tracing the religious factor from primitive culture to world civilizations. His two final volumes, The Coming World Civilization, published in 1956, and The Strength of Men and Nations, published in 1957, reveal his interest and competence in moral philosophy and its application to international problems amid the anxieties of a modern nuclear age.
Between The Meaning of God in Human Experience and The Strength of Men and Nations, the first and the last of the corpus of his work, almost every cognate subject was the object and subject of his wide-ranging, inquisitive mind. The Self: Its Body and Freedom, published in 1928, was a study of the natural base and the spiritual pinnacle of human selfhood in which psychological and philosophical disciplines were creatively merged. Appointed chairman of a laymen's missionary commission, Hocking issued a personal report entitled Re-thinking Missions in 1932 which aroused controversy in missionary circles and served to correct archaic missionary practices. It was a forerunner of the modern passion for "ecumenical dialogues." His volume entitled Freedom of the Press grew out of his membership on the Freedom of the Press Commission and served as a considered study of the relation of a free press to democratic societies.
Hocking's spirit and heart were as impressive as his rational and philosophical achievements. His serenity and imperturbability were the envy and admiration of all his colleagues who served with him on innumerable committees and commissions. He was unusually objective, even in the ordinary polemics of these meetings.
His educational partnership with his wife, Agnes Boyle O'Reilly, resulted in the founding of the famous Shady Hill School of Cambridge. Mrs. Hocking, who died in 1955, complemented his serenity by her ebullient and imaginative conversation. They were an impressive team for all their friends. Mrs. Hocking suffered a stroke years before her death. She was rendered speechless, but her husband reported, "We have our own way of communicating. I hold her hand while we both listen to her favorite musical records."