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Meaning of God in Human Experience: A Philosophic Study of Religion
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1912 edition. Excerpt: ... PART III PRELIMINARY WE do not know, in detail, what kind of world we would desire to live in. Wisdom to devise such a world we slowly acquire, and in infinite time may possess; meantime we tend to assume that our perfectly enlightened wish would correspond not too remotely with the general description of the world as we find it -- at least that it would more nearly approach these curious and mysterious arrangements than we now fathom. Further, there are certain major features of our world whose value, or part of whose value, can be made out. In adorning the figure of God the wishes of men have certainly had large play: it is not unimportant to enquire how much of this wish and will is permanently valid, how much is the passing work of a fancy too little self-conscious. We have been told in these latter days that a pluralistic world would be better than a world of One Being; that a world without an Absolute would be wholly as good as with one; and we have often been assured that God is no certain addition to human happiness, most lately by Mr. McTaggart. Emboldened by these representations we may make a few tentative excursions into this pleasant field of world-willing before girding ourselves to the more strenuous labor of truth-finding -- not forgetting, however, that the question what we need is also a question having a true answer. CHAPTER Xni THE NEED OF UNITY: MONISM AS BEARING ON OPTIMISM. MONISM may be optimistic or pessimistic, as we conceive the One Being to be good, bad, or indifferent. Schopenhauer's One was blind, and its products fit only to be swallowed up again. But monism at least permits optimism, since a world that is One has a chance of being safe. It may even be too safe. To the minds of pluralistic writers monism...
- GenresPhilosophyReligion
624 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1963
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June 28, 2021
A Philosophy of Thinking Bigger
Prompted by the recent publication of John Kaag's American Philosophy, I decided to revisit Ernest Hocking after an absence of several decades. He had been an old friend. On re-reading him, however, I find myself in a position similar to that of Mark Twain and his father. It is indeed amazing how much Hocking has learned over the years.
The Meaning of God is not a work of theology. It is a study of religion. The difference is decisive because it means that Hocking's concern is with experience - feelings, and opinions as well as other perceptions - not with theory or rationalisation of religious belief.
Religious experiences don't occur primarily in the confines of ecclesial space or liturgical ritual. They are commonplace and part of daily routine, although often classified as something else, usually to protect ourselves from accusations of religious prejudice. Our secularised society prefers the fiction that religious sentiments are strictly private. They, of course, are not.
One of the most obvious examples of public religion is politics. "The religious loyalties of men have contained the secret of political loyalty as of other death-involving loyalties." This is what Hocking claims. One has only to recall the evangelical fervour of the recent American elections, even among the irreligious, to confirm Hocking's proposition.
Politics, like religion, is at the intersection of feeling and idea. Except through an idea, feeling cannot express itself in a socially productive way. "Few feelings are not improved by public reflection." Mere feeling is mute. Reflection demands a medium for the expression of feelings. This medium is called an idea. Ideas are what we think with, not what we think of.
Making connections among ideas is what we call reasoning. There is a particular kind of reasoning (C. S. Pierce called it 'abduction’ to distinguish it from deduction and induction) that seeks to include more and more feelings and opinions within the ideas being discussed politically.
Ultimately this approach to thought came to be called Systems Theory, which is an important practical as well as epistemological method in many modern disciplines. The essence of this method is: where there is disagreement about actions or priorities to solve a problem, try to formulate an idea of the larger system in which this problem occurs. [cf. Ackoff, Russell Lincoln. 1974. Redesigning the Future: A Systems Approach to Societal Problems. New York ; London: Wiley-Interscience. and Vickers, Geoffrey. 2001. Value Systems and Social Process. London: Routledge.]
There is also a theological implication of this approach to thought. The idea that has traditionally been used for thinking about the most comprehensive system, that includes all other systems and their feelings without residue, is God. As Hocking puts it rather laconically, "Men may lose their gods and still have God left...the displacement of old ideas by new does not imply the essential falsity of the old."
Fancy that, a politics aimed at making everyone right. Quite an achievement. Perhaps the time has come to reconsider Hocking and his religion.
Prompted by the recent publication of John Kaag's American Philosophy, I decided to revisit Ernest Hocking after an absence of several decades. He had been an old friend. On re-reading him, however, I find myself in a position similar to that of Mark Twain and his father. It is indeed amazing how much Hocking has learned over the years.
The Meaning of God is not a work of theology. It is a study of religion. The difference is decisive because it means that Hocking's concern is with experience - feelings, and opinions as well as other perceptions - not with theory or rationalisation of religious belief.
Religious experiences don't occur primarily in the confines of ecclesial space or liturgical ritual. They are commonplace and part of daily routine, although often classified as something else, usually to protect ourselves from accusations of religious prejudice. Our secularised society prefers the fiction that religious sentiments are strictly private. They, of course, are not.
One of the most obvious examples of public religion is politics. "The religious loyalties of men have contained the secret of political loyalty as of other death-involving loyalties." This is what Hocking claims. One has only to recall the evangelical fervour of the recent American elections, even among the irreligious, to confirm Hocking's proposition.
Politics, like religion, is at the intersection of feeling and idea. Except through an idea, feeling cannot express itself in a socially productive way. "Few feelings are not improved by public reflection." Mere feeling is mute. Reflection demands a medium for the expression of feelings. This medium is called an idea. Ideas are what we think with, not what we think of.
Making connections among ideas is what we call reasoning. There is a particular kind of reasoning (C. S. Pierce called it 'abduction’ to distinguish it from deduction and induction) that seeks to include more and more feelings and opinions within the ideas being discussed politically.
Ultimately this approach to thought came to be called Systems Theory, which is an important practical as well as epistemological method in many modern disciplines. The essence of this method is: where there is disagreement about actions or priorities to solve a problem, try to formulate an idea of the larger system in which this problem occurs. [cf. Ackoff, Russell Lincoln. 1974. Redesigning the Future: A Systems Approach to Societal Problems. New York ; London: Wiley-Interscience. and Vickers, Geoffrey. 2001. Value Systems and Social Process. London: Routledge.]
There is also a theological implication of this approach to thought. The idea that has traditionally been used for thinking about the most comprehensive system, that includes all other systems and their feelings without residue, is God. As Hocking puts it rather laconically, "Men may lose their gods and still have God left...the displacement of old ideas by new does not imply the essential falsity of the old."
Fancy that, a politics aimed at making everyone right. Quite an achievement. Perhaps the time has come to reconsider Hocking and his religion.
December 31, 2025
A Pragmatic Idealist Approach To Religion
American philosophy is surprisingly rich in its efforts to understand religion and God. American studies of religion include the pragmatist William James' famous book, "The Varieties of Religious Experience". The Varieties of Religious Experience James' idealist friend and colleague Josiah Royce wrote a less well-known but highly valuable study in partial response to the "Varieties", "The Sources of Religious Insight". An important American philosophical study of religion which is almost forgotten today is this 1912 book by William Ernest Hocking, "The Meaning of God in Human Experience: A Philosophic Study of Religion". Hocking (1873 -- 1966) studied with both James and Royce and was an early American student of Edmund Husserl. Hocking was the successor at Harvard to Josiah Royce where he taught and wrote for many years. Hocking's "Meaning of God" is heavily indebted to both James and Royce and perhaps to Husserl as well. While writing an independent work, Hocking tries to combine elements of pragmatism with the absolute idealism he finds in Royce. The pragmatist/idealist combination is not the usual course of current philosophy but it continues to draw attention.
Hocking's book was influential in its time and went through 14 editions between 1912 and 1963. (My own copy acquired many years ago dates from January 1939.) The book is still available in off-print editions and online. The final edition dates from 1963 and commemorates the 50th anniversary of the book. It includes a Foreword by John Smith, a well-known scholar of American philosophy, and a new Preface by an aging Hocking. Smith described Hocking's book as "one of the serious philosophical treatments of religion in the 20th century" which both attempts to synthesize pragmatism and idealism and to combine them with a radical philosophy of experience.
Hocking wrote his new Preface against the background of the analytic and continental schools of philosophy which had largely eclipsed his own systematic, idealistic approach as well as against the background of pragmatism. Hocking found the heart of his book in its effort to broaden the philosophic concept of experience which in 1912 still tended to be limited to sense-data and to certain ideas of introspection. He found this limited view of the nature of experience led to solipsism and to the philosophic problem of "other minds". Hocking tried to combat this view in "The Meaning of God" arguing that knowledge of God and of other minds stood roughly on the same footing and that both were immediately present to an understanding of experience.
Hocking described 20th century philosophy as a "turning away from the sense-data-mental-data pattern of admitted experience." He wrote:
"The very vitality of the twentieth century is due
to its rejection of that pattern, its appeal to experience
neither physical nor ego-centered. Beside the vast fields
of social enquiry, the experience of values aesthetic and
ethical, there is a new recognition of the immense importance
of our central and inarticulate awareness of
existence which I have ventured to call "nuclear experience",
rich in structure and meaning."
Hocking's "Meaning of God" is lengthy and complex. The book takes many turns and seems as if Hocking was working out what he was going to say as he wrote. The writing style tends to be elaborate and ornate which makes for heavy reading interspersed with striking turns of phrase. The book is much more suggestive in style than it is clearly and rigorously argued. On a first reading, portions of the book are moving and insightful while other sections are windy and unconvincing. A certain coherence of approach comes through the diffuse sections of the book.
In a long Preface (to the original edition) Hocking sets out the many broad goals of the book in trying to understand religion and religious experience. Hocking finds a strong skepticism about whether religion can properly be understood in terms of reason. He finds a tendency to approach religion as a matter of "feeling" as he believes pragmatism does. The tendency to view religion as a matter of feeling or as a matter for subjectivity or narrative for example
remains current. Hocking wants to provide a religious alternative to, say, both naturalism and to existential angst.
Hocking deals explicitly with the pragmatism of James. In an important passage of the book, Hocking supports what he describes as a "negative pragmatism" which teaches "That which does not work is not true". He argues that pragmatism cannot be used positively as a criterion of truth and seeks, under pain of contradiction, to go beyond itself to a recognition of truth and reality independent of pragmatics.
The body of the book consists of six long parts. In the first, Hocking discusses religion as seen in its effects on human life. He argues that these effects show the importance of religion while they show as well that religious understanding cannot be limited to non-transcendental reality. In Part II, Hocking discusses efforts to describe religion solely in terms of feelings and subjectivity and he argues that objectivity and reality are included in all feelings and need to be unpacked and understood. He offers the following challenging definition of "religion" which is developed in the course of the study.
"Religion .... is the present attainment in a single experience of those objects which in the course of nature are reached only at the end of infinite progression. Religion is anticipated attainment."
Part III of the book, "The Need of God" defends the role of the Absolute -- a staple of idealism -- in concrete, finite human experience. Hocking's idealistic commitments account for the lack of attention his book receives but they are critical to his presentation. In the fourth part of the book, Hocking describes "how men know God". As suggested above he offers an approach to the "other minds" question which has a parallel in Wittgenstein's "private language" argument together with a restatement of the "ontological argument" beloved of philosophical idealists as a proof of God's existence.
For me the most eloquent and interesting section of the book was the long, sympathetic discussion of mysticism in Part V as critical in the human experience of God. Hocking develops what he calls the "Principle of Alternation" which tries to show how the human mind alternates -- between whole and part or between work and play -- and how this alternation brings a sense of the divine into everyday life. The final part of the book describes the fruits of religion which culminate in what Hocking calls the "Prophetic Consciousness". Hocking tries to find an activist approach for religious thought in issues of individual and social life. Hocking concluded his Preface to the 1963 edition of his book with a discussion of the "Prophetic Consciousness" and its importance. He drew parallels between certain parts of his book and Martin Buber's "I and Thou" which was and continues to receive a good deal of attention. Hocking wrote in discussing what he saw as the continued significance of his book of 50 years earlier:
"For with the certitudes of truth there are also certitudes
of action, possibilities of rising beyond futility to
control of the opening issues. In the inquiry into the
conditions of the "prophetic consciousness" we have an
answer to Angst and to despair, perhaps the most
pertinent contribution of the book to the disturbed
morale of an age of conflict and bent-to-death."
Hocking's book remains out of fashion for reasons which are not hard to find and requires patience to work through. I found much to be learned from the book. American pragmatism has strong ties both to realism and to idealism. In trying to articulate and show the necessity for a rational approach to religion as opposed to an exclusively subjective approach, Hocking's work remains challenging and important. Hocking's book is suitable for readers with a passionate interest and strong background in American pragmatism and in the philosophy of religion.
Robin Friedman
American philosophy is surprisingly rich in its efforts to understand religion and God. American studies of religion include the pragmatist William James' famous book, "The Varieties of Religious Experience". The Varieties of Religious Experience James' idealist friend and colleague Josiah Royce wrote a less well-known but highly valuable study in partial response to the "Varieties", "The Sources of Religious Insight". An important American philosophical study of religion which is almost forgotten today is this 1912 book by William Ernest Hocking, "The Meaning of God in Human Experience: A Philosophic Study of Religion". Hocking (1873 -- 1966) studied with both James and Royce and was an early American student of Edmund Husserl. Hocking was the successor at Harvard to Josiah Royce where he taught and wrote for many years. Hocking's "Meaning of God" is heavily indebted to both James and Royce and perhaps to Husserl as well. While writing an independent work, Hocking tries to combine elements of pragmatism with the absolute idealism he finds in Royce. The pragmatist/idealist combination is not the usual course of current philosophy but it continues to draw attention.
Hocking's book was influential in its time and went through 14 editions between 1912 and 1963. (My own copy acquired many years ago dates from January 1939.) The book is still available in off-print editions and online. The final edition dates from 1963 and commemorates the 50th anniversary of the book. It includes a Foreword by John Smith, a well-known scholar of American philosophy, and a new Preface by an aging Hocking. Smith described Hocking's book as "one of the serious philosophical treatments of religion in the 20th century" which both attempts to synthesize pragmatism and idealism and to combine them with a radical philosophy of experience.
Hocking wrote his new Preface against the background of the analytic and continental schools of philosophy which had largely eclipsed his own systematic, idealistic approach as well as against the background of pragmatism. Hocking found the heart of his book in its effort to broaden the philosophic concept of experience which in 1912 still tended to be limited to sense-data and to certain ideas of introspection. He found this limited view of the nature of experience led to solipsism and to the philosophic problem of "other minds". Hocking tried to combat this view in "The Meaning of God" arguing that knowledge of God and of other minds stood roughly on the same footing and that both were immediately present to an understanding of experience.
Hocking described 20th century philosophy as a "turning away from the sense-data-mental-data pattern of admitted experience." He wrote:
"The very vitality of the twentieth century is due
to its rejection of that pattern, its appeal to experience
neither physical nor ego-centered. Beside the vast fields
of social enquiry, the experience of values aesthetic and
ethical, there is a new recognition of the immense importance
of our central and inarticulate awareness of
existence which I have ventured to call "nuclear experience",
rich in structure and meaning."
Hocking's "Meaning of God" is lengthy and complex. The book takes many turns and seems as if Hocking was working out what he was going to say as he wrote. The writing style tends to be elaborate and ornate which makes for heavy reading interspersed with striking turns of phrase. The book is much more suggestive in style than it is clearly and rigorously argued. On a first reading, portions of the book are moving and insightful while other sections are windy and unconvincing. A certain coherence of approach comes through the diffuse sections of the book.
In a long Preface (to the original edition) Hocking sets out the many broad goals of the book in trying to understand religion and religious experience. Hocking finds a strong skepticism about whether religion can properly be understood in terms of reason. He finds a tendency to approach religion as a matter of "feeling" as he believes pragmatism does. The tendency to view religion as a matter of feeling or as a matter for subjectivity or narrative for example
remains current. Hocking wants to provide a religious alternative to, say, both naturalism and to existential angst.
Hocking deals explicitly with the pragmatism of James. In an important passage of the book, Hocking supports what he describes as a "negative pragmatism" which teaches "That which does not work is not true". He argues that pragmatism cannot be used positively as a criterion of truth and seeks, under pain of contradiction, to go beyond itself to a recognition of truth and reality independent of pragmatics.
The body of the book consists of six long parts. In the first, Hocking discusses religion as seen in its effects on human life. He argues that these effects show the importance of religion while they show as well that religious understanding cannot be limited to non-transcendental reality. In Part II, Hocking discusses efforts to describe religion solely in terms of feelings and subjectivity and he argues that objectivity and reality are included in all feelings and need to be unpacked and understood. He offers the following challenging definition of "religion" which is developed in the course of the study.
"Religion .... is the present attainment in a single experience of those objects which in the course of nature are reached only at the end of infinite progression. Religion is anticipated attainment."
Part III of the book, "The Need of God" defends the role of the Absolute -- a staple of idealism -- in concrete, finite human experience. Hocking's idealistic commitments account for the lack of attention his book receives but they are critical to his presentation. In the fourth part of the book, Hocking describes "how men know God". As suggested above he offers an approach to the "other minds" question which has a parallel in Wittgenstein's "private language" argument together with a restatement of the "ontological argument" beloved of philosophical idealists as a proof of God's existence.
For me the most eloquent and interesting section of the book was the long, sympathetic discussion of mysticism in Part V as critical in the human experience of God. Hocking develops what he calls the "Principle of Alternation" which tries to show how the human mind alternates -- between whole and part or between work and play -- and how this alternation brings a sense of the divine into everyday life. The final part of the book describes the fruits of religion which culminate in what Hocking calls the "Prophetic Consciousness". Hocking tries to find an activist approach for religious thought in issues of individual and social life. Hocking concluded his Preface to the 1963 edition of his book with a discussion of the "Prophetic Consciousness" and its importance. He drew parallels between certain parts of his book and Martin Buber's "I and Thou" which was and continues to receive a good deal of attention. Hocking wrote in discussing what he saw as the continued significance of his book of 50 years earlier:
"For with the certitudes of truth there are also certitudes
of action, possibilities of rising beyond futility to
control of the opening issues. In the inquiry into the
conditions of the "prophetic consciousness" we have an
answer to Angst and to despair, perhaps the most
pertinent contribution of the book to the disturbed
morale of an age of conflict and bent-to-death."
Hocking's book remains out of fashion for reasons which are not hard to find and requires patience to work through. I found much to be learned from the book. American pragmatism has strong ties both to realism and to idealism. In trying to articulate and show the necessity for a rational approach to religion as opposed to an exclusively subjective approach, Hocking's work remains challenging and important. Hocking's book is suitable for readers with a passionate interest and strong background in American pragmatism and in the philosophy of religion.
Robin Friedman
June 28, 2016
In American philosophy, Hocking is not generally put on the same level as James or Pierce or Royce, but this, his best work, should not be overlooked by any lover of wisdom. His insights on "negative pragmatism," the other minds problem, and worship and prayer are well worth pondering.
October 20, 2020
A very original thinker, I enjoyed his philosophy, deep but accessible to non-professionals. I picked it up because it is listed as a source work of the giant Urantia Book (UB) whose authors state they have used human sources to write their revelation, one of whom is William Ernest Hocking. The style here, quite original, is nothing like that of the Urantia Book. His more positive view of mysticism, to which he devotes a few chapters, is not shared by the Urantia Book. Be aware that if you explore the UB it claims to be a revelatory work prepared for our planet by representatives of a universe government. Wacky as that sounds, the philosophy of the UB is also profound and wonderfully expressed, even poetically at times. Whether or not you accept it as a revelation, its philosophy and spirituality is well worth investigating.
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