The American philosopher and educator William Torrey Harris was born in North Killingly (now part of Putnam), Connecticut. He attended preparatory schools in his native state and entered Yale College. There he was led to philosophy by Bronson Alcott's "Conversations" on Platonism, which convinced him of "the ideality of the material world" through "insight and reliance on reason." He left Yale in his junior year, dissatisfied with the deficiency of modern science and literature in the curriculum, and went to St. Louis.

In St. Louis, where Harris taught school for eight years and was an administrator for fourteen, he met Henry C. Brokmeyer, a Prussian immigrant who had acquired an enthusiasm for G. W. F. Hegel from reading F. H. Hedge's Prose Writers of Germany (1847) during some disputatious months at Brown University. In 1858, Harris, Brokmeyer, and a few friends began meeting informally...