Preface to privacy
pp. 81-94
in: Leroy Rouner (ed), Philosophy, religion, and the coming world civilization, Berlin, Springer, 1966Abstract
This is William Ernest Hocking, near the middle of The Meaning of God in Human Experience, the first of his full-scale philosophical publications, in 1912, and, as it happens, the first full-scale philosophical work I ever read, in its fourth printing, of 1922. It has stayed with me, like many other words of the author, heard or read, for its nutritious matter, part of a searching and original treatment of our knowledge of other minds, but also for the typically sane and imaginative charm of its manner, which is always able to make flowers bloom and fruits swell on even the stiffest epistemological sticks. If I have any sense of grievance against this quality of the man it is that he gave me early a quite misleading idea of the nature and destiny of academic philosophy as a profession.
