HOCKING, WILLIAM ERNEST (1873–1966), was an American philosopher of religion and metaphysician who also wrote on the philosophies of law, education, selfhood, and civilization. His magnum opus, The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912; 14th ed., 1962), combined Josiah Royce's idealist concern for meaning and the Absolute with William James's pragmatist commitment to science and experience. Hocking's original contribution was his solution to the problem of solipsism. One shares the mind of another, he argued, through the common perception of, and mutual concern for, a particular object. Mind is its content. One cannot simply think (pace Descartes); one must think something. This particular object of common concern is the content of eveyone's common mind.

The experience is articulated dialectically. Natural realism regards the world as objectively "outside" one's self. Subjective idealism responds that people know only their own individual reality "within" the mind. A dialectical synthesis...