William Ernest Hocking, the American idealist and philosopher of religion, was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He spent his early years in the Middle West and studied civil engineering at Iowa State University. Private reading stimulated an interest in philosophy and led him to study at Harvard, where he was influenced chiefly by William James and Josiah Royce. He completed his undergraduate and graduate studies at Harvard University and spent most of his long teaching career there, retiring in 1943.

Although his philosophical system embodies elements of pragmatism and realism, it is primarily an affirmation of Other Mind, or God, as ultimate reality known directly and intuitively. Hocking thus stands in the idealist tradition in modern philosophy and referred to his own position most commonly as "Objective Idealism." Primitive experience, involving the knowledge of other selves and the world, is conditioned by an immediate...